T .
■IheoryaM practice of english narrative verse
! I since1833
A N ■ N 01U I R V
DOOR WILLEM VAN DOORN
AMSTERDAM 1932 «■•■■**■■■■«•
N.W.DE ARBEIDERSPERS















THEORY AND PRAGTICE OF ENGLISH NARRATIVE VERSE SINCE 1833
AN ENQUIRY
ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT TER VERKRIJGING VAN DEN GRAAD VAN DOCTOR IN DE LETTEREN EN WIJSBEGEERTE AAN DE UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM OP GEZAG VAN DEN RECTOR-MAGNIFICUS MR. P. SCHOLTEN, HOOGLEERAAR IN DE FACULTEIT DER RECHTSGELEERDHEID, IN HET OPENBAAR TE VERDEDIGEN IN DE AULA DER UNIVERSITEIT, OP VRIJDAG 26 FEBR. 1932, DES NAMIDDAGS TE 3lA URE
DOOR
WILLEM VAN DOORN
GEBOREN TE ARNHEM
AMSTERDAM N.V. DE ARBEIDERSPERS







Aan mijn vrouw







MOTTO.
Detras de cada hecho, ó mas bien, en el fondo del hecho mismo, hay una idea estética, y a veces una teoria 6 una doctrina completa, de la cual el artista se da cuenta ó no, pero que im* pera y rige en su concepción de un modo eficaz y reatisimo.
Menéndez y Pelayo. (Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en Espafia Ixm.)







Nu de taak, die ik mij bij het schrijven van dit proef» schrift stelde, tot een min of meer bevredigend eind gebracht is, betuig ik aan allen, die mij op enigerlei wijze behulpzaam zijn geweest bij het op 't spoor komen, ver* krijgen of rangschikken van de in de volgende studie ver* werkte gegevens, mijn oprechte dank.
In de allereerste plaats, Hooggeleerde Swaen, komt deze dank toe aan U, die om Uw merkwaardige vertrouwdheid met allerlei kanten en hoeken van ons uitgestrekte Anglis* tiese studieveld, en het wonderbaar*verre reiken van — moge mij de uitdrukking vergund zijn — Uw wetenschap* pelike „voelhorens", wel de ideale promotor moogt worden genoemd.
Hooggeleerde Van der Gaaf, specialiteit als weinigen op het gebied van de historiese syntaxis van het Engels, onder Uw gehoor heb ik nooit gezeten. Echter reken ik mij Uw leerling, daar Uw doorwrochte publicaties steeds mijn volle belangstelling hebben gehad. Een tegenstelling tussen litte* rator en grammaticus aanvaard ik niet. De syntaxis is een der twee hoofdpijlers van de stylistiek.
Hooggeleerde Faddegon, wat ik heb aan inzicht in de algemeene taalwetenschap, dank ik aan U, en indien weinig blijken van die schuld te vinden zijn in dit proefschrift, aan mijn stof alleen is het te wijten. Met een soortgelijke ver* ontschuldiging moge ook de Latinist van het Keizerrijk, Dr. J. de Decker, genoegen nemen, wiens opgewekte colleges mij indertijd zeer boeiden.
Gaarne herdenk ik hier nog met gevoelens van dankbare genegenheid de heer W. F. Wolters, Directeursin*ruste van de R.H.B.S. te Bergen*op*Zoom, die de grondslagen legde voor mijn latere kennis van het Engels; en de heer M. G. van Neck, „one of the giant race before the Flood", die mij leiding gaf bij mijn akte*studie, ten tijde dat de regeering zich aan de opleiding van leraren in vreemde talen maar weinig gelegen liet liggen. Verder hebben, behalve mijn collega, Mejuffrouw Dr. C. Japikse, die mij zekerheid verschafte betreffende een vermoeden mijnerzijds ten opzichte van Tennyson, ook de bibliotheken, die mij met boek en inlich* ting hebben bijgestaan, inzonderheid die van het British Museum, recht op dankbare vermelding.







CHAPTER I.
John Staart Mill's Theory of Poetry.
Though the subject of this study may strike a potential reader as forbidding, on becoming an actual reader he may find his fears falsified, and may even come to consider the views set forth in it worthy of his attention. The book is going to be critical rather than informative, and is concerned with an aesthetic theory which, as is usually the case with aesthetic theories, has arisen side by side with new artistic tendencies, influencing these tendencies and, in turn, being influenced by them. Both the theory and the tendencies are modern, and constitute a complete rupture with views which the Ancients cherished in theory and practice; which the men of the Middle Ages considered too self*evident to require any vindication, and which our forerunners of the Renascence — to adopt Matthew Arnold's spelling of the word — would never have dreamt of doubting or disputing.
For a brief formulation of the theory we may turn to a modern ars poëtica of no particular merit, Greening Lam* born's 'Rudiments of Criticism', and cull, from this exceed* ingly derivative work, the foliowing verdict: 'It is no more a poet's function than it is a painter's to teil a tale; each gives us pictures and leaves us to interpret them or weave stories about them for ourselves, or simply to enjoy them withapurely sensuous pleasure'. (Op. cit. p. 127, top.) Occur* ring as it does in a book written by a teacher for the use of prospective teachers, it voices, of course, a consensus of opinion, and may even seem a truism. Especially the first part of the passage quoted may seem so, and yet the view is of recent origin. As a matter of fact we need not go back t more than a hundred years to find the narrative poem in high esteem. Titles like 'Marmion' and 'Mazeppa' will occur to everyone, and we know that those poems were actually bought by the reading public, gushed over by cultured ladies, and well paid for by enterprising publishers.
Why then should the majority of modern readers have lost all taste for such productions? Prose stories continue to make their appeal, not only to "the people", not only to hardworked business*men in want of relaxation, but likewise to many members of our educated and professional classes,



to medical men, lawyers and engineers, as any bookseller can testify. They continue to make their appeal, in spite of the disparaging way in which stories, whether in prose or verse, are often spoken of by "superior persons", who in doing so are blissfully unconscious of echoing a greater man than themselves. Some may think it possible to counter John Stuart Mill's contemptuous dismissal of "mere stories" as the mental food either of children and barbarians or of "persons whose time is divided between sightseeing, gossip, and fashionable dissipation" — or George Meredith's denial, in practice, of the artistic possibilities of pure narrative1) when he wrote the book that brought him most fame, viz. "The Egoist" — by appealing to G. K. Chesterton, who, al* ways in sophisticated sympathy with the unsophisticated, sings the praises of stories on more than one occasion. But most of Chesterton's eulogistic utterances — e.g. in "The Everlasting Man", pp. 283—285 — are strongly coloured by his idiosyncrasies, and verdiets like: "The priest told the people stories; and the philosophers did not understand the philosophy of stories", (we may, perhaps, draw attention to the sweeping, Chesterfonian use of the definite article) do not seem to be relevant to the matter in hand. It mav be added here that the ethical and religious significance of New Testament parables like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son have, naturally, always tended to obscure their merits as things of literary beauty, whereas it is exactly with lite* rary values and valuations that the present study deals.
When the fact is stated that, unlike the prose story, which is still "going strong", the story in verse is fallenon evil days and evil tongues, it is needless to roint to seeming exceptions, like Masefield's "Everlasting Mercy" or Gilbert Frankau's "One of Us", which are — or were for a time — as popular as poems can be expected to become in our days, but whose popularity is dwarfed by that of Wells's "Mr. Polly", or even by that of Ernest Bramah's "Kai Lung". A successful narrative poem may find its hundreds of readers, a successful prose story — it must be borne in mind that we are throughout concerned, not with ephemeral successes, but with literature — f inds its tens of thousands. But although
1) Cf. Priestley's monograph, p. 151: [Meredith] 'is a faulty narrator, because narrative does not interest him'.



in the course of our enquiry some of our attention may be claimed by the way in which the prose story has come to usurp the field, crowding out the story in verse, this side of the question will occupy us far less than will be done by the relations bsiween narrative poetry and the lyric.
Those lovers of literature — and they are rather numerous nowadays, — who profess to consider the term "lyrical poetry" tautological, since to them lyric and poetry are synonymous terms*) may be surprised to hear that the first to advance this view — and to advance it in its extremest form — was a theorist whose name they never associate with literature at all. They know him as an advocate of women's rights and of personal liberty, as a political economist of the Benthamite school, etc, but they are ignorant of the fact that there were certain literary questions that likewise en* gaged his attention, and that an important paper contributed by him (over the nom de plume "Antiquus") to the January issue of the "Monthly Repository" for 1833, is entitled: What is Poetry?
In this paper Mill, stating that "the minds and hearts of greatest depth and elevation are commonly those" which take greatest delight in poetry", whereas "the shallowest and
emptiest are, by universal remark, the most addicted to
novel*reading", (M. p. 204) but at the same time rejecting with scorn the vulgar view "which confounds poetry with metrical composition" undertook to find a more satis* factory definition of poetry than had hitherto been formu* lated. His starting*point was the vague consciousness, common to many (presumably not vulgar) people, that the term "poetry" imports something sui generis.
"While a half*philosophy disdains the distinctions in*
dicated by popular language, philosophy carried to its high* est point may frame new ones, but never sets aside the old, content with correcting and regularizing them" (M. p. 202). The latter thing was accordingly what Mill did. Accepting the view that poetry is "the better part of all art whatever, and of real life too", he found 'true poetry' in 'almost all good novels' and even admitted that 'many of the finest
8) Cf. John Drinkwater's study on The Lyric', (Secker, no date, out of print) especfalry the conclusion on pp. 63 and 64. (The writer's copy was bought in 1915).



poems are in the form of novels'. But he distinguished sharply between the interest feit in a novel as such, and the interest excited by poetry, 'for the one is derived from mcï* dent, the other from the representation of feeïing'. (M. p. 203). According to him 'the two sources of interest corres* pond to two distinct, and (as respects their greatest develop* ment) mutually exclusive, characters of mind' (M. p. 203). Story*telling is valued by children, by nations in their in* fancy, and — by the more shallow*minded of our contempo* raries, people who sometimes, it is true, fancy themselves lovers of poetry, because they relish novels in verse. 'But poetry, which is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of the human heart, is interesting only to those to whom it recalls what they have feit, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been different'. (M. pp. 204, 205).
Mill admits the existence of descriptive poetry. But here, too, the poetry is not in the thing 'described'. It is in the state of mind in which it may be contemplated. 'Descriptive
poetry consists in description of things as they appear,
not as they are; and it paints them not in their bare and natural lineaments, but arranged in the colours and seen through the medium of the imagination set in action by the feelings. lf a poet is to describe a lion, he will not set about describing him as a naturalist would, nor even as a traveller would, who was intent upon stating the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He describes him by imagery, that is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and contrasts which might occur to a mind contemplating the lion, in the state of awe, wonder, or terror, which the spectacle naturally excites.... Now this is describing the lion professedly, but the state of excitement of the spectator really'. (M. p. 207).
Having drawn, as he thinks, sharp lines of division be* tween poetry and narrative, and between poetry and descrip* tion, Mill proceeds to distinguish poetry from eloquence, which, as well as poetry, is thoughts coloured by the feelings. Yet common apprehension and philosophic criticism alike recognise a distinction between the two: there is much that everyone would call eloquence, which no one would think of classing as poetry Poetry and eloquence are both



alike the expression of feeling. But we should say
that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind. Eloquence is feeling pour* ing itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action. All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy
(our italics) What we have said to ourselves we may
teil to others afterwards; what we have said or done in solitude, we may voluntarily reproduce when we know that other eyes are upon us. But no tracé of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself. The actor knows that there is an audience present; but if he act as though he knew it, he acts ill. A poet may write poetry with the intention of publishing it; he may write it even for the express purpose of being paid for it; that it should be poetry, being written under such influences, is far less prob*
able When the act of utterance is not itself the end,
but a means to an end, when the expression of his emotions, or of his thoughts tinged by his emotions, is tinged by [the] desire of making an impression upon another mind, then it
ceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence The persons
who have most feeling of their own, if intellectual culture have given them a language in which to express it, have the highest faculty of poetry; those who best understand the feelings of others, are the most eloquent'. (M. pp. 208—210).
What next follows is an attempted application of the same principle of division — viz. that of soliloquizing poetry ver* sus attitudinizing eloquence — to the arts of music, painting, sculpture and architecture, which, as it does not bear on our subject, need not occupy us, except for a passing sneer at epic poems, which 'in so far as [they are] epic (i.e. narrative), [are] not poetry at all', and which he compares with histor* ical paintings (M. p. 213). Mill's concluding paragraph (M. p. 217) runs: 'The above hints have no pretension to the character of a theory. They are merely thrown out for the consideration of thinkers, in the hope that if they do not contain the truth, they may do somewhat to suggest it.



Nor would they, crude as they are, have been deemed worthy of publication in any country but one in which the philosophy of art is so completely neglected, that whatever may serve to put any inquiring mind upon this kind of in* vestigation, cannot well, however imperfect in itself, fail altogether to be of use.'
When Mill referred in such sweeping terms to the com* plete neglect of the theory of art in England, he was mani* festly unfair to illustrious eighteenth century predecessors like Shaftesbury, but this unfairness — bred, most likely, of ignorance — need not detain us. A few months afterwards he returned to the charge, contributing to the October issue of the Repository a second article, The Two Kinds of Poetry, in which he enlarges on the ancient maxim 'nascitur poëta non fit'. He cites Shelley in illustration, but admits cases like Wordsworth's, where et fit would be the proper term, thought waiting upon feeling with the former, feeling waiting upon thought with the latter (M. p. 226).
Wordsworth never, even for the space of a few stanzas, appears entirely given up (Mill's italics) to exultation, or grief or pity ,or love, or admiration, or devotion, or even animal spirits (M. p. 227), though he has feeling enough to form a decent, graceful, even beautiful decoration to a
thought which is in itself interesting and moving' The
genius of Wordsworth 'is essentially unlyrical', whereas lyric poetry is 'more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other'. It is by culture that 'Wordsworth has reared from his own inward nature the richest harvest ever brought forth by a soil of so little depth'. Shelley is the very reverse of all this. 'For him, intentional mental discipline had done little; the vividness of his emotions and of his sensations had done all' (M. p. 228). His was the poetic temperament accompanied by exquisite senses, to which he owed 'that exuberance of
imagery, which when unrepressed amounts even to a
vice'. With his impassioned nature he must of necessity have ripened into a most powerful intellect, if circumstances had not thwarted this development. For 'the greater the indivi* dual's capability of happiness and misery, the stronger in* terest has that individual in arriving at truth.' (M. p. 234). Shelley has lacked 'systematic intellectual culture in a measure proportioned to the intensity of his own nature'. On the other hand, so long as education is largely made up of



'artificialities and conventionalisms', and the 'training of the intellect' consists chieily in 'the mere inculcation of tradi*
tional opinions, many of which must necessarily be
false; it is not always clear that the poet of acquired ideas has the advantage over him whose feeling has been his sole teacher' (M. p. 235).
Mill would seem here to have strayed somewhat from the soliloquy*theory of his first paper, which, for the rest, he never retracted. And he also seems to have lost sight of his second starting?point: the identification of any emotion uttered in words with poetry. For he asked (M. p. 223) point* blank, 'What is poetry, but the thoughts and words in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself?'
But both starting'point and conclusion, both the first paper and the second, are at one in ruling narrative poetry out of court, nay, in denying to it the veriest right to exist.



CHAPTER II.
Objections to Mill's Theory.
With Stuart Mill's dictum that 'a half*philosophy disdains the classifications and distinctions indicated by popular language' whereas 'philosophy carried to its highest point may frame new ones, but never sets aside the old, content with correcting and regularizing them', there will be few to find fault. There will, however, be some who, while endors* ing it, will think Mill's subsequent reasoning all the stranger. If it is philosophical to identify poetical sentiments, whether single or in sequence, with poetry, irrespective of the medium through which they find expression, we shall be equally justified in identifying the pictorial qualities of an author — or even of a musician — with painting properly so called. For centuries the term 'poetry' has been univer* sally understood to mean, or at least to imply, just what Stuart Mill sets his face against, viz. metrical composition. This being so, it follows that any attempted definition of poetry in which the metrical element is either ignored or dis* missed as irrelevant is bound to fail. In Irving Babbitt's words, a definition 'must not reflect our opinion of what a word should mean, but what it actually has meant.")
Would Mill himself, we may ask, have welcomed anthol* ogies of 'poetry' containing not merely a sheaf of time* honoured 'metrical compositions' (with, perhaps, some frag* ments of 'prose poetry' thrown in), but likewise a number of 'poems in the Millian sense': some watercolours by Turn* er, Rembrandt's etching 'The Three Trees' and the score of, say, Weber's Freischütz overture? Would he not have, in practice, disowned his own contention that it is possible to produce poems or poetry in any medium, so that e.g. a symphony might be a poem?
But if poetry has for centuries and centuries been identi* fied with metrical composition, and if Mill is too high* handed in dismissing this identification with a sneer, it cannot on the other hand be denied that the meaning of the term has gradually expanded if not shifted. When Keats declared that 'the poetry of earth is never dead', and he
3) 'Rousseau and Romanticism', (p. 1).



instanced the songs of grasshopper and cricket; when Byron called the stars 'the poetry of heaven', it was the modified meaning of the word that was in their minds. As Souriau observes in his study on 'the aesthetic rêverie'4) modern man has got into the habit of labelling as poetical any and every object that produces on him an impression similar to that produced by beautiful verses. But to recognise this is one thing; it is quite another to bestow, in an enquiry like this, the name of poetry either on those impressions themselves or on such natural and social phenomena, including art, as tend to produce them. Even Mill does not do this. When he identifies poetry with a soliloquy of the soul, what he has in view is a soliloquy that has got into a certain audible, visible or tangible shape. It seems, therefore, advisable — waiving the much*vexed question of metre versus rhythm — to reserve the name of poetry for a certain easily recognis* able form of literature, and (ignoring the slipshod and mis* leading connotation of the German words Dichtung and Dichter) to call only such authors poets as express them* selves in that form.6) If Mill is right, his theory may find — but that is not our concern — its legitimate expansion in the field of other arts; if he is wrong, it should be possible on purely literary grounds to refute him.
Our first argument against his theory is furnished by his own practice. Surely it must have been a case of Horace's naturam expelles furca tarnen usque recurret, when, less than three years later, in the London Review for July 1835, he set himself, in an entirely orthodox fashion, to combat 'Christopher North' and Lockhart, who — the former in Blackwood, the latter in the Quarterly Review — had ridi* culed Tennyson's poems. The only consistent attitude for Mill to adopt would have been to warn off the censorious gentlemen with something in the vein of Sheppstone, the eccentric landscape*painter in John Hargrave's novel 'Har* bottle'6): 'This purports to be poetry, that is to say a solilo* quy of the soul. From the infinite variety of souls follows an unlimited range of possible soliloquies, and it would be sheer impertinence to apply the test of so*called literary
4) La rêverie esthétique, p. 5.
•) Cf. likewise R.C.K. Ensor's views, quoted in Chapter X. •) Cf. pp. 63—75 of that noveL
2



criticism to such a soliloquy. Suppose the mussel were a reasonable creature, should we be justified in telling it about possible flaws in the pearl it has secreted? — What though the soliloquy is printed? The prospective reader, who has no claim on the poet whatever, is left with the merest Hob* son's choice: he may, according to his likes and dislikes (and to his lights), take the poem or leave it. He may at most — if he thinks his understanding of it rather too com* plete, indulge in searchings of the heart, wondering whether, after all, the poem was not composed with an eye to effect, in which case, not being a genuine soliloquy, it would cease to be a poem. But he must not criticize it any more than he would criticize a wild flower.' Instead, however, of taking up this attitude, Mill holds up a few complete poems and certain separate passages for our admiration, awarding special praise to Tennyson's power of 'creating scenery (these are Mill's italics, the rest in the quotations are the present writer's), in keeping with some state of human feel* ing; so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself, with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality.' Proceeding to dis* cuss 'Mariana in the Moated Grange', he does not 'anticipate that this little poem will be equally relished at first by all
lovers of poetry indeed, if it were, its merit could be
but of the humblest kind; for sentiments and imagery which can be received at once, and with equal ease, into every
mind, must necessarily be trite We do not, indeed,
defend all the expressions in it, some of which seem to have
been extorted from the author by the tyranny of rhyme 
But see whether poetic imagery ever conveyed a more
intense conception of [such a moated grange] or of the
feeling of such an inmate Words surely never excited a
more vivid feeling of physical and spiritual dreariness '
Next tackling The Lady of Shalott Mill remarks: 'There is not a stanza in the following poem which can be feit or even understood as the poet intended, unless the read* er's imagination and feelings are already in the state which results from the passage next preceding, or rather from all which precedes. The very breaks, which divide the story into parts, all teil. Mill quotes nearly the entire poem, to conclude: 'In powers of narrative and scène* painting combined, this poem must be ranked among the



very first of its class.... Along with all this there is in the poem all that power of making a few touches do the whole work, which excites our admiration in Coleridge. Every line suggests so much more than it says, that much may be left unsaid: the concentration, which is the soul of nar ra* tive, is obtained without the sacrifice of reality and life. Where the march of the story requires that the mind shall pause, details are specified; where rapidity is necessary, they are all brought bef ore us at a flash '
Further on Stuart Mill is even more explicit. He com* pares Tennyson with Shelley, to the latter's disadvantage, qualifying his poetry as 'fitted to give extreme pleasure to persons of similar organization to the poet, but not likely to be sympathized in, because not understood, by any other persons; and scarcely conducing at all to the noblest end of poetry as an intellectual pursuit, that of acting upon the desires and characters of mankind through their emo* tions, to raise them towards the perfection of their nature. This, like every other adaptation of means to ends, is the
work of cultivated reason ' and, it may be added, pre*
cludes endless soliloquy, which according to Santayana is 'the discourse of brutes and madmen\T) And again: 'In a prose*writer great beauties bespeak forgiveness for innu* merable negligences; but poems, especially short poems, attain permanent fame only by the most finished perfection in the details.'8)
The quotations with their italics may be left to speak for themselves. But this much is certain: in Mill's eyes, too, poetry has an end, and in defining this end he never loses sight of the reader, i.e. of the cultured, the ideal reader, who, it would seem then, is entitled to make his demands on the poet.
In conceding this right to the reader, however, it is im* possible not to grant to the poet a very important thing in return, namely the consciousness of having an audience. Even the lyric poet most devoted to what we may term the poetry of isolation is disheartened and put to silence by the reflection that he lacks listeners.
*) 'Reason in Common Sense', p. 156.
8) Cf. Souriau, La beauté rationelle, p. 106 ('La beauté, c'est 1'évidente perfection') and the chapter introduced by this proposition.



Schücking9) supplies the telling instance of Annette von Droste*Hülshoff. If it had not been for a very small audience, consisting in fact of one man, she would have given up poetry altogether and been satisfied with the mental images of what she now strove to realize in words. Or, per* haps, she would have indulged in half*finished productions, comprehensible only to herself, her isolation developing a vein of growing eccentricity in her, which, thanks to that one auditor, it did not.
When a poet abandons himself to his reveries, that is, when he is content merely to soliloquize, he produces nothing. The composition of poetry requires an effort, an imposition of order upon chaos. Besides, — unlike abstract thought, which being, in fact, identical with its formulation is nothing if not couched in words, — a genuine poetical soliloquy of the mind, consisting as it does of a series of concrete images, can and will dispense with all verbal language whatever, and if a poet should wish to assist his memory in retaining both the image*sequence and its emo* tional colouring, a few jottings in individual telegraphese would completely serve his need. We should, however, be very rash in honouring such jottings with the name of poetry. On the other hand we may ask wheier the motivation which a lyric is seldom altogether without, and which of its nature is little else than compendious narrative, is intended for the poet's own benefit, or for the enlightenment of the reader. If Wordsworth, in his Daffodils by UUswater, had really addressed his own soul, he would probably have used the second person instead of the first, saying 'You wandered lonely', etc. Goethe begins what is usually looked upon as a lyric, and what he himself calls a 'Lied' (Rettung: 'Mein Madchen ward mir ungetreu', etc), with some purely narra* tive lines, and nobody can by any stretch of meaning call the poem in question a soliloquy. Instances might be multiplied, drawn from the most varied sources and belonging to the most heterogeneous literatures. Inversely, if there is any literary production which comes near to being a soliloquy, it is the famous Diary in which Mr. Samuel Pepys chronicled the day's happenings, whether great or small, and occasion* ally sat in judgement on himself for his own peccadilloes»
•) Cf. Sch. pp. 57, 58.



Few, however, will be prepared to call this typical bourgeois a poet and his diary poetry. And the large majority of those who will scout the entire suggestion will object that, apart from all considerations of rime and rhythm, Pepys's work is destitute of elevation because his ideas are pedestrian.
This leads us to the question of translated poetry. If, as follows — or would follow — from Mill's attempted defini* tion of poetry as the soul soliloquizing, the poet's business is exclusively with images, not words, how is it that even the most painstaking prose*rendering of a great poem fails to convey an adequate idea of the excellence of the original? The images remain the same, and yet the poetry is gone. Again, if a rendering into verse pleases, an investigation that need not be very close will reveal the fact that the genius and assiduity of the translator have contrived to produce something practically new, having a charm of its own, something which owes to the original little if anything bevond its 'germ', which, transferred to the 'soil' of a mind thinking in another language, has struck root there, growing and blossoming in a way sui generis. If in the process the original words count for anything at all, each of them has to be closely studied, both in itself and in its relation to the context as regards sounds and feeling*tones just as well as with respect to subtleties of rhythm; a new harmony has to be achieved by means of perfectly suitable equivalents, and time and again the translator will see that such equi* valents as present themselves either refuse to yield the required rhythm, or prove unsuitable by suggesting trivial associations. And yet he toils on, never completely satisfied, and invariably asking himself the same question: 'Would Homer — or Dante, or Goethe — have approved of this? Could he, the great poet I am endeavouring to translate now, have been expected to express himself in this way, if he had been a countryman of mine?'
Whatever be the result — and the result may sometimes be hailed as poetry of no common order, nay, as surpassing the original10) — it cannot be maintained that this kind of
u) We may refer to the classic instance of Bridges's lyric O Youth Whose Hope Is High ('Shorter Poems' III 19), a free translation of a poem by Théophile Gautier, who in his turn had improved upon Thomas Moore.



literary labour is in any respect a mental soliloquy. We may much rather call it a constant dialogue between the con* scientious translator and the spirit of the poet whom he mentally consults. But evidently this conclusion leads us on to another: even an apparent soliloquy is not a real soliloquy; internat dialogue of some kind is always going on, whenever poetry is being written.
Like any other artist, a poet, when engaged in creative work, divides his personality. He is an artificer toiling for an exacting taskmaster; he is a taskmaster urging on with words of alternate reproof, correction, condemnation and praise, a servant who is capable only by fits and starts, and who, left to himself, will simply let his hands rest and dream of the fine things he would hke to do.
And where a poet seems to be actually soliloquizing, — that is, when he abandons himself entirely to the stream of his reveries, resembling most a musical composer, who, letting himself completely go, is improvising upon his instru* ment, even there must be division of personality, this time between the mental adventurer, taken up with his experienc* es, and the mental recorder by his side who chronicles them. In the absence of such a recorder, what fruit would the creative artist reap? What would he bring back from his mental adventure, from his voyage of discovery in the realm of fancies or of sounds? Obviously nothing, for even the most willing hand cannot be made to travel over the paper fast enough to keep up with the gallop of the mind. Obviously the 'soliloquy' together with its accompaniment of emotions and moods must afterwards be recóllected in the tranquillity of study and writing«desk if the artist is to reap any benefit from his adventure, and then we behold him setting himself a task, making a hundred false starts, judging, filing, changing (for the better, for the worse), condemning, sometimes throwing his pen down in despair, presently taking it up again. He considers his provisional product detachedly, as if it was another's, or he puts him* self in the place of an imaginary reader, and meanwhile his fantasy keeps playing him tricks, repeatedly trying to fly off in other directions, taking its clue from this suggestive word or that, and as often called back to duty and service by the poet, who, even when he is hugging his isolation most closely, cannot be altogether passive and does not work in entire



unconsciousness, as some people fondly imagine. 'The real artist, the man of genius, knows what he does; when people speak of his unconsciousness, he Iets them talk, knowing that they mean this as a compliment; but let anyone presume to criticize some detail of his achievement, and he will be ready to give his reasons. Point out a mistake to him, he will reply that he has made it on purpose'.u) Horace's dictum ('Ars poëtica' 359) that even Homer sometimes nods, may be held to exculpate lesser artists, but it never implied that inadvertency on the part of a poet is to be considered as something normal. On the contrary, it is sufficiënt proof that no amount of presumably angelic dictation while ostensibly 'rapt' can absolve a poet from the duty of exert* ing his judgement. He is a 'responsible party'.
And in using language as his instrument, in choosing eer* tain words to the exclusion of certain others, in grouping them and arranging them, he places himself under unshirk* able obligations both to the linguistic testators who left him their language and — to his co*inheritors of it. Even if he introducés modifications and neologisms, even if he violates syntax to an unprecedented extent, — his debt remains the same. If countless generations before him had not shaped his words, filling them with feeling*tones; if they had not traced syntactical roads for his imaged thoughts to follow, where would he be? He may add to the stock, nay, in proportion to his importance as an author, he will add to it, but the bulk of it he received as a free gift, and he should be corre* spondingly thankful, in his thoughts and in his actions.
There is even more for which he should be thankful. In obeying his creative impulses he follows the lead of number* 'less generations both of physical and of spiritual ancestors. It is the fashion nowadays to speak of self*expression where 'the need of communication' would be a more appropriate, because truer, term, since the inner urge to seek transmis* sion of some dominant emotion is characteristic of every man, and must be taken for granted in a poet. But such a poet has had predecessors who, after composing a reliëf* giving lay in solitude, have invariably come back to bring their reliëf to full consummation either by reciting it or by getting it printed. He is one of an endless succession of
u) So II 132.



artists who, each in his turn, were the mouthpieces or vocal members of the linguistic communities or societies to which he belonged.
A subsequent chapter, in which the need of communica* tion will likewise receive fuller treatment, will deal.with the relations of narrative and poetry, or beauty achieved in verse. But first we must speak about the much«vexed word 'beauty' itself.



STELLINGEN.
L
Het verschil tussen [letterkundig] proza en poëzie is óf formeel öf fiktief.
II.
Saintsbury heeft ongelijk in zijn vereenzelviging van Horne's Akinetos (in 'Orion') met 'obstinate conservatism'. ('Cambridge History of English Literature', Vol XII, p. 118.)
III.
Saintsbury dwaalt door het metrum, dat William Morris aanwendt in 'The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs', in verband te brengen met dat van 'The Tale of Gamelyn'. ('Cambr. Hist. of English Lit.', Vol. XIII, p. 252.)
IV.
Het afbrekend oordeel van Coleridge over 'Daffodils by Ullswater' van Wordsworth ('Biographia Literaria', p. 244, Everyman) is ongerechtvaardigd.
V.
Indien Gustave Lanson gelijk heeft met zijn geringschat» tend oordeel over Béranger als dichter ('Histoire de la litté* rature francaise', II, pp. 278—280), dan kan er van de roem van Speenhoff nog veel minder overblijven.
VI.
Men moet bij het bepalen van Rubén Darto's rang als dichter terdege onderscheid maken tussen zijn betekenis voor de Spaanssprekende landen en die voor de beschaafde wereld in 't algemeen.
VII.
Het feit dat Woden steeds wordt voorgesteld als ruiter, is voldoende bewijs, dat zijn positie als god van jonger datum is dan die van Donar en de andere Asen.



VIÏL
In Poe's versregel
'Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken', (61e regel van The Raven)
kan 'broken' niet beschouwd worden als deelwoord.
IX.
Alwie, beducht voor „opslorping" van het Nederlands door het Duits, zich wil kanten tegen germanismen, dient in de eerste plaats zijn kracht te zoeken in de levende syntaxis van de gesproken taal.
X.
Constructies als: „Zijn plannen werden de[n] bodem inge* slagen," zijn zowel histories als grammaties zo goed te ver* dedigen, dat ze niet als „fout" mogen worden beschouwd.
XI.
De spelvorm 't wordt verkeerd aangewend in combina* ties als: „Duurt 't te lang?"
XII.
'Old Nick', als humoristiese betiteÜng van de duivel, is niet ontstaan uit de naam Nicholas, zoals Philippson ('Ger* manisches Heidentum bei den Angelsachsen', Leipzig, 1929, blz. 86) nog meent.
XIII.
Het Engelse lurk dient in verband te worden gebracht met het Nederlandse loeren, zowel etymologies als naar de betekenis.
XIV.
Het gebruik van „dorado" als z.g. „verbetering" van eldorado is op geen enkele grond te rechtvaardigen, en wordt van domme pedanterie tot vrijpostigheid, zodra een Nederlander deze uit wanbegrip ontstane vorm wil aan* wenden in een vreemde taal.



XV.
De uitdrukking 'sucking the monkey' voor het zich op slinkse wijze verschaffen van sterke drank — volgens Mar* ryat (in het dertigste hoofdstuk van zijn 'Peter Simple') in gebruik in West*Indië — wijst op Spaanse invloed.
XVI.
Met het dwaze en ergerlike misbruik, dat in rechtskun* dige kringen gemaakt wordt van het woord „verdachte", dient ten spoedigste te worden gebroken.
XVII.
De toenemende gewoonte van uitgevers, vooral in Neder* land en Duitsland, om regels druk niet te laten inspringen bij het begin van een alinea, is zeer te betreuren, daar een ondoelmatig gebruiksvoorwerp op „schoonheid" geen aan* spraak kan maken.
XVIII.
Voor Greeks' in
'And fall Greeks' foremost warriors, stricken rife,'
(Doughty, 'The Dawn in Britain', Vol. II, p. 53)
lees Gauls'.
XIX.
In:
This fellow's wise enough to play the foole, And to do that well craves a kinde of wit: He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time: And like the Haggard, checke at every Feather That comes before his eye...
(Twelfe Night', Act III, Sc. I, 11. 60—65),
behoeft men niet, met Dr. Johnson, het And van regel 64 te vervangen door Not om „zin" te krijgen.
XX.
Het woord 'bear' in regel 43 van Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' —
'If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear' —
wordt ten onrechte in verscheidene bloemlezingen „ge* emendeerd" tot 'hear'.



XXI.
In de vierde strofe van Shelley's 'To a Skylark': The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight; Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad daylight Thou art unseen...'
(Hutchinson's editie, Oxford, 1904, bl. 669)
behoort de komma niet te staan achter Heaven, maar achter daylight.
XXII.
In de vijfde strofe van Shelley's 'To a Skylark':
'Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear Until we hardly see — we feel that it is there,' —
(ibid.)
is de silver sphere niet de maan, maar de morgenster. XXIII.
De sentimentele bril, waardoor zovele Britse en Ameri* kaanse letterkundigen de 'Morte Darthur' van Malory be* kijken, is niet bevorderlik voor een goede waardering van het boek.
XXIV.
De pogingen, die sommige Neerlandici in de laatste tijd aanwenden om bij hun leerlingen een begrip van verskunst aan te brengen door ze zelf verzen te laten maken, ver* dienen toejuiching.
XXV.
Zullen vertalingen uit de vreemde taal betrouwbare uit* komsten geven als eind*examenopgaven H.B.S., dan dienen ,de moeilikheden die er in voorkomen van andere aard te zijn dan tot dusver doorgaans het geval is geweest



CHAPTER III.
Beauty and the Cultured Layman.
England being the classical home of empiricism, it seems fft that in some preliminary chapter of a study devoted to certain aspects of certain English poets, an attempt should be made to arrivé by empirical methods at some sort of aesthetic theory which, without claiming to be altogether in* vulnerable or to meet any and every imaginable case, shall be sufficiently coherent and consistent to serve our need in this enquiry.
In making the attempt we will leave literature alone. We want some general principle to go by, something allgemeins gültig, and literature can only furnish an endless succession and weiter of changing tastes and subverted standards.12) And we will not take sides in the question whether some special 'sense of beauty' is to be assumed or not. We only takè our stand on the reality of the aesthetic experience, in studying which we will ignore the various theories that have been evolved by separate schools of thought. They are unsuitable for our purpose and inconsistent with the em* piricism to which we have committed ourselves. We want the reactions of the layman, not the sophistications of the metaphysician.
But since the average layman is notoriously mute, we are put to the necessity of finding one whose susceptibility to the 'appeal of beauty' shall go as unchallenged as his ability to give us an intelligible and intelligent record of his aes* thetic experiences. And such a man we believe we have found in W. H. Hudson, field*naturalist and author, self* made man and hater of our 'mind«killing schools' ('Birds and Man', p. 139), lover of books and birds, and sensitive — in spite of a few forgivable limitations — to the magie of both art and nature. Poetry being admittedly the most synthetic of all the arts, — since it appeals through the ear to heart and imagination, besides combining thought with music, and
") Cf. Dilthey, p. 126: Seitdem die Voraussetzung vom mustergültigen Wert der antiken Dichtung gefallen ist, können nur aus der menschlichen Natur das Gesetz des Schonen und die Regeln der Poesie abgeleitet werden.



uniting architectonic qualities with pictorial, — we could have found no better man to go to for the data required than this thoughtful author of unquestioned sincerity.
Now these data comprise first of all what we may term the raw stuff of aesthetic feeling, viz., the primitive responses to light and colour, and, in a somewhat lesser degree, to pleasing sound. To the stimuli of light and colour the cul* tured layman is, as a rule, keenly alive, and he is inclined — in blissful ignorance of Souriau's energetic denial1") — to look upon his responses to them as aesthetic. Hudson does so when, walking by a river side, he experiences a thrill of delight at the sudden appearance in his field of vision of 'that living jewel, the shining blue kingfisher' ('Birds and Man', p. 269); or when he States that he likes a hilltop grove in 'Downland' best on certain burning silvery days of summer and at a distance of a mile or two, giving as his reason that then 'the tall columnar trunks of the pines, showing the light between, seem to have a wavering motion and, with the high dense roof of branches, look absolutely black against the brilliant whiteness of the air and the pale hot sky beyond'. ('Adventures among Birds', p. 260). A similar feeling is aroused in him by the spire of Chichester Cathedral, which 'has a singular beauty when, sunflushed, it appears white against a black cloud', ('Nature in Downland', p. 237); by the eyebright, 'that minute scrub a couple of inches high, deepest green in colour, with many small yet conspicuous blossoms, white and rosescolour, streaked with purple, and, for the pupil of its eye, one spot of divine yellow', ('Nature in Downland', p. 52); by the juniper, feathery in appearance thanks to its 'pine»needle*like fine foliage': 'it is brighter green than the furze; the topmost slender sprays, gracefully curved at their tips, are tinged with red, and where the foliage is thick, there is a bluish tint on the green that is like a bloom. In some lights, especially in the early mornings, when the level sunbeams strike on the bushes, wet with dew or melting hoarfrost, this blueness gives the plant a rare, delicate, changeful beauty. Even here in the downs, where most of the junipers one finds are a poor scrub, I have been
1S) So I p. 306: Considérées, isolément.... les couleurs peuvent être agréables ou désagréables, excitantes ou calmantes; mais elles ne sont ni belles ni laides. As regards colours, vide p. 34, note, of this study.



enchanted at the effects produced by the light on it, but the loveliest effect was in part fortuitous, and came as a delightful surprise'. ('Nat. in Downland', p. 218).
As most of Hudson's works furnish an abundance of in* stances of the same kind, it would be needless to multiply them here. Those given have been quoted for their compara* tive simplicity, the simplest being the first. And yet a closer examination will reveal that even in the first instance the 'raw stuff' is not pure, either because the law of association has come into play, or from some other cause. Is is clear, for example, that association plays its part even in the case of the kingfisher's sudden appearance, since Hudson bestows on him the appellation of 'that living jewel', and it is interesting to notice that Hudson, like anybody else, will describe nature in terms of art and vice versa. A grass plot will suggest a carpet, and inversely a carpet will call up a plot of grass. In 'Nature in Downland' (p. 132) Hudson, commenting upon the dwarf or plume thistle, states that you do not notice or even see its leaves unless you look for them, 'for, like the plantain leaves, they are found close to the ground; sewn, so to speak, into the fabric of the turf. The solitary flowerhead is practically stemless, and rests like a cup or vase on the earth — a great amethyst among gems of other colours and of smaller size. (our italics). And as flowers sometimes suggest cups and vases, so will trees suggest columns, and 'columnar treestrunks' suggest temples. Hudson notices that the tree«clumps which please him best are those 'which are most templedike in their forms. Thus, a grove of trees of various kinds growing
in a dense mass gives me no pleasure at all: while a
grove of Scotch firs, the trunks sufficiently far apart [so] as to appear like pillars upholding the dark dense foliage, has a singular attraction. In some instances the effect on the hill itself of its crown of trees is to give it the appearance of a vast mound artificially raised by man on which to build or plant his temple' ('Adv. among Birds', p. 259).
As for the colours which Hudson liked best — and which he tacitly assumed to be the favourite colours of everybody — they were such as carried human associations. The reds he preferred were 'the delicate roseate and pinky shades'; 'they are more to us than the purest and most hAninous tints. And flowers please us best when they exhibit the



loveliest human tints — the apple*blossom and the bind* weed, musk mallow and almond and wild rose, for example.' ('Birds and Man', p. 142). Pursuing his argument, Hudson (on page 155 of the same book) derives the charm of a blue flower from the blue of human eyes. But he readily assented when a critical correspondent asked: 'Why shouldn't the heaven's blue make us love flowers? It does in my case, I know, and I can feel the different blues of skies and air and distance in flower*blue'. Gorgeous colours he disliked and he hated gardens: '....our cultivated blooms are not only artificially produced and in some degree monstrosities, but they are seen in unnatural conditions, in crowds to* gether, and in most cases selected on account of their gor*
geous colouring ('Birds and Man', p. 151) the mass of
colour glares at and takes possession of me, and spreads itself over and blots out a hundred delicate and prized images of things seen that existed in the mind'. (ibid. p. 152). But this dislike of 'gorgeous colouring' did not extend to the strong yellows furnished by Nature herself, especially in autumn. In his book 'Afoot in England', in a chapter called (in memory of William Cobbett) 'Rural Rides', Hud* son, describing an afternoon ride on his bicycle in the neigh* bourhood of Silchester, grows enthusiastic over the 'autumnal glory in the trees'. 'Sometimes (p. 122), seeing the road be* fore me carpeted with pure yellow, I said to myself, now I am coming to elms; but when the road shone red and russet*gold before me I knew it was overhung by beeches. But the oak is the common tree in this place, and from every high point on the road I saw far before me and on either hand the woods and copses all a tawny yellow gold — the hue of the dying oak leaf. The tall larches were lemon*yellow, and when growing among tall pines produced a singular effect. Best of all was it where beeches grew among the firs, and the low sun on my left hand shining through the wood gave the coloured translucent leaves an unimaginable splendour. This was the very effect which men, inspired by a sacred passion, had sought to reproduce in their noblest work — the Gothic cathedral and church, its dim interior lit by many*coloured stained glass.'
The fact is that with Hudson, the lover of open air life, Nature can never go entirely wrong, though even with respect to her he confesses to having preferences and preju*



dices, finding for instance a lack of spiritual appeal in all brilliantly coloured flowers. ('A Hind in Richmond Park', p. 76). Man, however, may go wrong, and often does, and this in spite of the artistic taboos which homo faber has at all times observed without Nature furnishing any prece* dent. To mention here only the juxtaposition of colours, we may note that Nature does not impose upon herself the slightest limitations;14) that any wild flower looks well in the surrounding grass, and that the colour gamut of even the most gorgeous sunset will always harmonize; facts, of course, with which Hudson must have been at least sub* consciously familiar. It strikes him, nevertheless, as most curious that the purple of the thistle and the bright blue of the bugloss look so well together, 'but the sight was a very beautiful as well as a singular one'. ('Nat. in Downl.', p. 42).
This leads us to another element that enters into the aesthetic experience, namely that feeling of strangeness which, on the one hand, has affinities with certain mystical states of the mind, and on the other may be little more than a response to contrast and novelty. Some theorists have considered this element of strangeness to be the essential thing in 'beauty', a view which can hardly be right, seeing how often strangeness will provoke aversion and even rejection. Hudson himself instances how the feeling of strangeness which one experiences in a colony like Tasma* nia (and for that matter in any new country lacking links with the past), is apt to resemble 'that sense of desolation which assails us at the thought of the heartless voids and immensities of the universe'. ('Afoot in England', p. 85). As for rejection, listen to an experience of his in 'Down*
land': 'On the South downs proper, east of the Adur the
hills are larger and there is less tillage; the clumps or groves and woods so few that the effect is strange and inharmo* nious. The isolated grove that springs suddenly to the sight as one mounts a hill, shady and deepest green on a pale unshaded country, is a blot on the landscape; and here, if anywhere in England, one would be glad to see an axe laid at the foot of trees of noble growth.' ('Nature in Downl.' p. 215). Surely this is sufficiently strong language for a lover of nature to use.
") Compare Lange, p. 59.



But let us listen to him again, this time when he holds forth about the aesthetic effect of contrast and novelty: 'Never is moist verdure so refreshing and delightful to the eye as when we come to it from brown heaths and grey barren downs and uplands. So, too, the greenness of the green earth sharpens our pleasure in all stony and waste places; trim flower gardens show us the beauty of thorns and briars, and make us in love with desolation. As in light and shade, wet and dry, tempest and calm, so the peculiar attractions of each scène and aspect of nature are best 'illustrated by their contraries'. ('Hampshire Days', p. 203). In 'Nature in Downland' (p. 34), describing a rustic group — Sussex reapers with a partlydoaded waggon drawn by 'three couples of great black bullocks' — he acknowledges the effect of the arrangement of the creatures composing the group as well as the effect of their forms, but the attrib* utes its fascinating appeal principally to the striking manner in which the huge, black oxen contrast with the shining red and gold of the wheat, going on to say, 'How strikingly beautiful — startlingly one might almost say, on account of its rarity — this contrast of black and gold is in nature may be seen even in so comparatively small a creature as a blackbird, perched or moving about amid the brilliant yel* low foliage of a horse«chestnut or some other tree in October.'
Hudson's strongest impressions of 'strangeness', however, are not so much derived from real contrasts as from shifted points of view and from changed states of the atmosphere. What do we get by ascending to greater heights? he asks, and answers that we get new aspects of nature. 'This is the same kind of pleasure which we experience in walking or riding through a picturesque country; but the aesthetic plea* sure of the mountain may actually seem more, or keener, on account of the greater novelty — the unlikeness of the scène to the more or less familiar aspects of nature on the level earth. For we live on the earth and pay but brief visits to mountain summits.' ('Nature in Downland', p. 28). But Hudson is especially eloquent about atmospheric effects. To his mind 'the best appearance presented by the higher hill« top groves is on a hot, windless summer day, during the phenomenon of 'Visible air' or 'heat', when the atmosphere near the surface appears as a silvery mist, or as thinnest



white and crystalline flames, ascending, wavering, dancing, and producing an illusion of motion in all distant solid ob* jects, such as houses, fences, trees, and cattle. If the sun had greater power, this silvery flamedike appearance would become more visible still and take the appearance of water of a marvellous brilliancy, as of molten silver, flowing over the earth, with cattle standing knee*deep in it, and distant buildings and groves rising like islands out of it....' ('Ad* ventures among Birds', p. 260). He states that when he looks at the sky, or a cloud, or the sea, his sight does not instinct* ively rest on it, but is satisfied with a glance; 'if we con* tinue to gaze, not occupied with something in us, but seein? vividly, it is because some object or some strange or beauti» ful atmospheric effect excites our admiration or curiosity..' ('Nature in Downland', p. 24). Such an effect will even beautify what familiarity had staled and left without any appeal. 'The hills in this clear autumn weather, familiar as their forms are and often as we have walked on them, seem almost like a new region to the eye, known and yet novel; the preternatural distinctness and newness of the heights around us produce the illusion that we ourselves have changed to something better and higher, and have a more piercing sight and greater power and swiftness. It is as if
like Mercury we had wings on our heels ' ('Nat. in
Downland', p. 201).
The last statement leads us to a discussion of a third element that plays its part, viz., the feeling of elation, which Hudson experiences 'among mountains, on moors, and in vast desolate marshes, or iron»bound coasts, and on wide seaside flats and saltings, and on level plains'. Accord* ing to him this feeling is always the same in kind, though it 'differs in character in each locality.... The wildness, the wide horizon and sense of liberty after the confinement of roads and fences and hedges, come first: it is the local aspect, appealing as it does to the aesthetic faculties, which makes the feeling distinctive'. ('Nat. in Downland', p. 21). The extension of one's horizon need not be very consider*
able: 'It is a very common error that the degree of
pleasure we have in looking on a wide prospect depends on our height above the surrounding earth — in other words that the wider the horizon the greater the pleasure. The fact is, once we have got above the world, and have an



unobstructed view all round, whether the height above the surrounding country be 500 or 5000 feet, then we at once experience all that sense of freedom, triumph and elation which the mind is capable of'. ('Nature in Downland', pp. 27, 28). But bodily elevation is quite dispensable and may even yield in its effect to an ordinary summer rain, when 'the exhilarating effect of the newly washed and brightened air and sight of the blue sky after the depressing cloud has passed undoubtedly counts for much; the responsive phys* ical change in us acts on the sense organs, and they, too, appear to have been washed and made clean and able to render truer and brighter images than before'. ('Adventures among Birds', p. 144). The strongest instance recorded by Hudson, however, owed its power to sylvan silence. He was walking in the New Forest one day, when 'the loveliness of that green leafy world, its silence and its melody and the divine sunlight so wrought on me that for a few precious moments it produced a mystical state, that rare condition of beautiful illusions when the feet are off the ground, when on some occasions, we appear to be one with nature, un* bodied like the poet's bird"), floating, diffused in it'. ('A Travelier in Little Things', p. 254). He adds immediately that 'there are also other occasions when this transfigured aspect of nature produces the idea that we are in commu* nion with or in the presence of unearthly entities'; in other words that this mystical state is commoner with him than his few sparse references to it might lead us to think. And behold, with this we have returned to the 'feeling of strange* ness'. Such is the infinite complexity of the aesthetic expe* rience that whenever we are considering it in one of its aspects we find, before we have done, that another aspect has insidiously put itself in the place of the first.
The cause is obvious. Associations once formed are a tenacious and irrepressible brood, for ever struggling for supremacy, yet holding together; essential to the aesthetic experience, often intensifying, as often disturbing it, and as one man's responses are different from another's, we laugh at each other's raptures. One summer*day Hudson, walking in the middle of a green pasture, came 'on a pool of rain*
u) The reference is, of course, to the fifteenth line of Shelley's 'Skylark'.



water, thirty or forty feet long, collected in a depression in the ground, of that blue colour sometimes seen in a shallow pool in certain states of the atmosphere and sun*
light an indescribable and very wonderful tint, unlike
the blue of a lake or of the deep sea, or of any blue flower or mineral, but you perhaps think it more beautiful than any of these; and if it must be compared with something else it perhaps comes nearest to deep sapphire blues. When an artist in search of a subject sees it he looks aside and, going on his way, tries to forget it, as when he sees the hedges hung with spiders' lace sparkling with rainbow* coloured dewdrops, knowing that these effects are beyond the reach of his art. And on this fairy lake in the midst of the pale green field, its blue surf ace ruffled by the light wind, floated three or four white ducks; whiter than the sea*gulls, for they were all purest white, with no colour ex* cept on their yellow beaks. The light wind ruffled their feathers too, a little, as they turned this way and that, disturbed at my approach; and just then, when I stood to gaze, the sun shone full out after the passing of a light cloud, and flushed the blue pool and floating birds, silvering the ripples and causing the plumage to shine as if with a light of its own.... The beauty I saw was undoubtedly due to the peculiar conditions — to the blue colour of the water, the ruffling wind, the whiteness of the plumage, and the' sudden magie of the sunlight; but the effect would not have been so entrancing if the floating birds had not also been m beautiful in themselves — in shape and in their surpassing whiteness.
'Now I am quite sure the reader will smile For, though
he will readily admit that the sun beautifies many things, he draws the line at a duck — the common domestic one. Like all of us, he has his prepossessions and can't get away
from them If any pleasing memories or associations
connect themselves with [a duck] they are not of an aesthetic character: they refer to the duck without its feathers, to its smell and taste when eaten with green peas in their season. If I am asked how I escaped from these inconvenient, not to say degrading associations, the only answer would be that associations of another kind were probably formed at some early period'. ('Adventures among Birds', pp. 105*108).
These last words may refer to the time when Hudson was
3



living in the Argentine pampa, speaking more Spanish than English, but it is a bare possibility, no more. The Spanish term ganso is freely used as an invective, just like its English equivalent goose, yet on more than one occasion Hudson expresses his admiration for that fine, brave, and intelligent bird, devoting to it a long chapter in his 'Birds and Man'. It is far more likely that his singularly independent mind, accustomed from his youth up to see and judge for itself, must receive the credit.
He can even appreciate the goose's voice, and in this he resembled the poet Cowper, who thought a goose 'no bad performer' upon a common or in a farmyard (quoted from Hayley II, p. 230, in 'Birds and Man', p. 77). 'All natural sounds heard in their proper surroundings are pleasing..")
I have often been deeply impressed [by the braying of
an ass] in a wild, silent country, in a place where herds of semi»wild asses roamed over the plains; and the sound at a distance had a wild expression that accorded with the scène, and owing to its much greater power affected the mind more than the trumpeting of wild swans, and shrill neighing of wild horses, and other far^reaching cries of wild animals'. ('Birds and Man', p. 78). And again, on page 211 of the same book: 'the mere wildness represented by the voice of a great wild bird in his lonely haunts is so grateful, that the sound itself, whatever its quality may be, delights, and is more than the most beautiful music.'
It would appear then that the appeal of sound is, far more than that of light and colour, dependent upon its associa* iticns. As flowers pleased Hudson best when they exhibited the loveliest human tints, so did bird notes delight him most when they resembled 'fresh, young, highly musical human voices'. ('Birds and Man', p. 142). What has served to make the blackbird 'a favourite, and more to most of us a song* ster than any other, not excepting the nightingale?' It is his delicious song — 'a voice of the loveliest quality with an expression derived from its resemblance to a melodious, brightened human voice, uttered in a leisurely and careless manner, as of a person talking sweetly and mingling talk
") Compare So I p. 247 for a different view: 'La nature est coloriste incomparable; elle est trés médiocre musicienne.' But two pages further on he recognises the aesthetic value of natural -iunds such as the rustling of reeds, the humming of insccts, etc.



with snatches of song.' ('Adv. among Birds', pp. 187, 188). The atmosphere, which affects everything, affects likewise the songs and cries of birds, and 'after copious rains in summer' they appear 'washed and purified'; 'and just as we inhale the new delicious air into our lungs we take the new melody into our souls'. (ibid. p. 144). Besides, to Hudson, whether fancy or not, a bird's song expresses emotions akin to ours. One evening, walking in a park near Oxford, he stopped to admire a hawthorn tree covered with its fresh bloom. 'On a twig on the thorn a female chaffinch was perched, silent and motionless, when presently from the top of an elm tree close by its mate flew down, describ* ing a pretty wavering curve in its descent, and arriving at the bush, and still flying, circling round it, he emitted his song; not the usual loud impetuous song he utters when perched; in form and shape only it was the same, the notes issuing in the same order, but lower, infinitely sweeter, tender, etherealised. The song ended as the bird dropped lightly by the side of its little mate', (ibid. p. 145). Even lifeless and apparently unlikely things may produce sounds which — far less for their intrinsic beauty than for the associations that come into play — evoke strong aesthetic responses from Hudson, who for instance does not hesitate
to call 'the rural telegraph line a harp and mysterious
voice in the desert and in all solitary places.' ('Nature in Downland', p. 183).
Hudson notices on occasion — incidentally and as a matter of course — that the actual attunement of the mind of hearer or spectator counts for at least as much as the impressions he receives from without, and that things which had left him indifferent at first, would often assume aesthetic significance ior him long afterwards. He had visited Bath and its Abbey Church more than once without being con* scious of any special appeal. He was upwards of sixty when, yisiting the church again, he feit impelled to haunt it, loving it better every day. He thought he 'had never properly seen it, or had not seen it in the right emotional mood', but now he began 'to think it the best of all the great abbey churches of England and the equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind.' ('Afoot in England', p. 155). An important emo* tionalizing factor is the sense of smell. From a purely aesthetic point of view it may, indeed, be negligible in itself,



but its power of precipitating and intensifying aesthetic experiences is great. Hudson — who, save for a few obvious exceptions, was not only tolerant of all smells, but took a positive pleasure in many of them, including the smells of sawpits and tanneries, burning peat and sheepfolds — devotes to this power a long chapter in his last book, which he did not live to see through the press: 'A Hind in Rich* mond Park'. To him (p. 64) the most agreeable of natural odours were 'the aromatic and fragrant that emanate from plants'. The odours of spices and fruits he considers infe* rior, because of their associations with taste; but when a gust of flowery fragrance was wafted to him from a blos* soming beanfield or a field of lucerne, it was always 'like a new and wonderful experience'. Odours 'do not register impressions in our brains which may be reproduced at will, as it is with sights and sounds'; hence, according to Hudson, the perennial novelty of their appeal. At noon, with the sun shining rightest and hottest and the gorse at its most fragrant, he would feel templed to cast himself down before a thicket drinking the odour in. The effect was to make him languid, to give him dreams of another world, 'a vast open*air cathedral where a great festival and ceremony [was] perpetually in progress, and acolytes, in scores and hundreds, with beautiful bright faces, in flame*yellow and orange surplices, [were] ever and ever coming towards
[him] swinging their censers ' (p. 66). And yet this
smell of the gorse is 'not of the higher order, since in its rich* ness there lurks a suggestion of flavours.' That Hudson should have found a spiritual appeal in the quiet colouring of certain flowers will hardly astonish us; but he asserts the same thing about the smells of such flowers as hedge* rose, violet, bog asphodel, primrose, scented orchis, 'spiri* tual' in the flower*scent meaning with him 'an effect on the mind, one we are already familiar with; we find it in eer* tain human faces, in their expression, in human voices, too, in some moods, in speech or song, in certain flowers in their appearance — never, perhaps, in any brilliantly* coloured flower (cf. p. 27 of this study) — in certain bird sounds; it may be in a certain note or phrase of its music; also in other non*human things, even in the inorganic world, as in certain aspects of earth and sea and sky in certain rare atmospheric conditions. Finally, it is a more ethereal



scent than those of other flowers, therefore more evanes* cent, yet more penetrating, touching the mind, as We imag* ine, to something more than a mere aesthetic satisfaction'. (pp. 76 and 77).
It is evident that the greater this spiritual appeal, the greater its tendency to absorb, or even kill, the purely aesthetic response. As a concomitant to the latter, the spiri* tual appeal is invaluable; so, for that matter, is the feeling of elation. But whenever they become predominant the aesthetic response properly so called goes by the board. This is pre*eminently the case in the mystical state, when spiritual appeal and feeling of elation, attaining to their maximum of intensity, become fused so to say, drowning the sensual perceptions in their fusion; in those inexplic* able moments in our converse with nature, when, as Hudson says ('A Traveller in Little Things', p. 95), 'hearing and seeing and smelling and feeling are one sense, when the sweet sound that falls from a bird is but the blue of heaven, the green of earth, and the golden sunshine made audible'. Hudson calls these moments 'beautiful'. It is clear that he can do so only in retrospect. In the mystical expe* rience any percipience of 'beauty' must be lost.
Under the staling influence of repetition and custom it gets lost likewise. But on the other hand, there are countless instances of the aesthetic response remaining impossible until the familiarizing influence of repetition and custom has done its work. On page 259 of 'Adventures among Birds' Hudson remarks about the hill*top groves in 'Downland' that it must have been in quite recent times, probably during the last half of the eighteenth century, that the idea first came into the mind of a landowner here and there that a grove on the top of a high bare chalk down would have a noble appearance and form a striking landmark for all the country round. The result is our hilLtop clumps; and one would have imagined that the effect would be altogether bad; for how could a tall dark grove on a hill in a country of such an aspect of smooth rounded pale*green downs, be anything but inharmonious? Either it is not so, or long custom has reconciled us to this ornament invented by man, and has even made it pleasing to the eye'. That familiarity is the great reconciler and not a mere breeder of contempt appears again on pp. 138 and 139 of 'Afoot in Eng*



land': 'Winchester, Ely, York, Canterbury, Exeter, and Wells. To the dry, mechanical mind of the architect these great cathedrals are in the highest degree imperfect, accord* ing to the rules of his art: to all others this imperfectness is their chief excellence and glory; for they are in a sense a growth, a flower of many minds and many periods, and are imperfect even as Nature is in her rocks and trees; and, being in harmony with Nature and like Nature, they are inexpressibly beautiful and satisfying beyond all buildings to the aesthetic as well as to the religious sense'. After ob* serving (on p. 182 of 'Nature in Downland') how, in rural districts, the telegraph line, from being a danger to birds has grown to be an advantage to them, 'affording a conve* nient perch and lofty look^out which many species habitu* aüy pref er to trees and bushes', he goes on: Tt has become natural to them, as if we had supplied a real want in their lives, an omiSsion of nature. So, too, it is curious to note that the long line of tall straight poles and suspended wires, which one yould imagine to be nothing but a disfigurement to the landscape, fit into it at many points so admirably as to be an improvement, a positive beauty in the scène, reminding one of those tall guide«posts with a cross=piece near the top to be found on some of the extensive tidal flats on our sea*coast. The upright pole and the flagstaff, and even the slender stone cross in many villages, produce an effect like that of the slim Lombardy poplar in the land» scape and please the eye. The gibbet, too, in vanished days doubtless had a similar aesthetic value'. (our italics).
It would seem that this chapter has run to a number of pages sufficiënt to warrant us in formulating some sort of conclusion. We have been concerned throughout with the field»naturalist Hudson's aesthetic responses to nature, Scenery and surroundings, not with his speculations on the beautiful', for which the reader had better consult his last volume, 'A Hind in Richmond Park'. Much more that he has recorded is grist for our mill, shrewd observations and instructive experiences which, because of their more imme» diate bearing on art and poetry, we reserve for the next chapter. But he came at last to assume special senses of beauty, truth and justice as we recognise senses of smell, feeling and sight and in this it seems inadvisable to follow



him. The assumption of some special 'sense of beauty' must imply: perception of 'beauty an sich', as an absolute entity. But cur business is solely with the aesthetic experience, solely with the mental attitude denoted by this word. For such an attitude of the mind may be supposed to remain the same in essence in all periods of history, in all countries, in all individuals, no matter by what means it is provoked. The taste of mediaeval man was scorned by the men of the Renascence, the taste of the Augustans was impeached by Wordsworth and ridiculed by Keats. But it does not follow that when Walther von der Vogelweide's audience pro* nounced some lyric beautiful, their mental attitude was essentially different from that of an admirer of Góngora, or even that the aesthetic responses of a Chesterfield dif* fered in kind from those of the most uncompromising romantJcist. However, this is not yet the place to deal with the aesthetic aspect of poetry; we have purposely confined our cullings from Hudson's pronouncements to the 'neutral' material furnished by his emotions in the presence of nature and of the works performed by man as one of nature's agents, believing that the key found in such a way will fit more locks than one. The perennial appeal of sea and sky, rock and river, meadow and forest, falling leaf and waning moon, will enable us to understand man's attitude before works of art, whose beauty often seems only for a day.
Now the mental attitude constituting the aesthetic expe* rience will, if properly analysed, be found to present two aspects.
First, there is active acceptance, which must be distin* guished both from mere passive resignation, and from the purely mystical state, which is not acceptance but surrender. It is quite immaterial whether this acceptance takes place in obedience to our gratified senses of hearing and seeing, or because of the apparent realization of some ideal, or in consequence of mental assimilation of which the mind suddenly becomes conscious, or in a mood of elation, under the combined influence of senses, associations and mystical suggestions.
Secondly, there is a feeling of wonder, not so strong as to drown the first element, nor so weak as to be itself drowned by it. The wonder feit may range from mere sur* prise at what strikes eye or ear with the effect of novelty,



to a feeling of the strangeness of things in general and of our acceptance of a certain combination of things in parti* cular. It is cléar that this feeling of wonder easily passes into a mystical state, in which case the aesthetic moment as such has come to an end. It is likewise clear that the balance between the two simultaneous mental states is very precarious, as the active acceptance we refer to tends to become a matter of fact way of 'taking things for granted', as the feeling of wonder wears off. Besides, other emotions, no matter whether concomitant or parasitical, tend to upset the balance. One illustration must suffice here. A winding country lane may charm us, thanks, partly, to a sense of mystery enveloping it; to a certain bend interrupting the view, but luring us on by a promise of interesting discoveries to be made. If our emotion while contemplating it is aesthetic, We accept the mystery and the lure as part of the charm, thanks — as likeïy as not — to a subconscious feeling that man is a born adventurer and discoverer. But if our curiosity grows, prompting us to action, and if we set out to see with our bodily eyes what that fascinating bend conceals, our aesthetic experience has become, as such, a thing of the past. And if the result of our exploration is disappointing, the remembrance of the transient spell we were under will be pretty sure to evoke a cynical mood, and we will sneer at what we shall then call our infatuation.



CHAPTER IV.
Mutual Relations of Storystelling and Poetry.
We have read Stuart Mill's sneers at mere storystelling, and it will not be considered too fanciful if we impute the sneers — apart from the hothouse education he was given by his father, and from that intellectual arrogance which scholarly seclusion is apt to foster in most characters — chiefly to his individualistic creed, storystelling being — ethnology has proved it up to the hilt — an eminently social function. If it be objected that ethnology has only recently come to its full stature as a science, and that in 1833 it was too early in the day yet for Mill to have had any inkling of its future development, we may point to Germans like Herder, who, long before Mill's days, and with a scientific equipment in no wise superior to his, did have such inklings and would not have been astonished, had they lived to see them verified by modern research. Mill was, it is generally agreed, a figure of transition; much of his thought derives on the one hand from the English eighteenth century em« piricists, on the other hand from Rousseau. For years and years he was concerned with the rights and excellencies of the individual, and for all his leanings towards socialism as he grew older, the year 1859, a quarter of a century af ter he published the paper that has provided the startingspoint to this enquiry, still found him identifying individuality with development, and asserting that 'it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, welUdevel* oped human beings'. (On Liberty, p. 119). The obvious reply to this assertion is, of course, first, to point to the dangers of 'shutting oneself up in one's ivory tower', and to the risk of mistaking eccentricity for character; and secondly, to insist that development, intellectual and moral, presupposes choice, which implies not only the inter* action of our personality with other people's, but the ad» justment — not the assimilation — of our volition to the communal will of that social body to which we belong.
As a matter of fact, story*telling, if not, perhaps, quite as old as the human race, must be a very old cultural acquisition, and a most precious one, since it is such an



important civilizing factor. As van Gennep observes (op. cit. p. 39), literary a tivity under the form of myths and legends is a 'fundamental institution', lacking which half» civilized or even 'savage' societies would be without one of their principal means of cohesion. It is by learning to recite myths and legends that e.g. Australian natives be» come acquainted with the functioning of their cults. Such recitals are, indeed, rites in themselves, and indispensable whenever the tribe contemplates a hunt, a raid, or an expe* dition. We likewise find that ceremonial recitals introducé agricultural acts like ploughing, sowing, planting and reaping, whenever nomads have settled down, becoming — like the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico — tillers of the soil. Among Africans on the march stories are chanted lightening the loads that the bearers have to carry and ani* mating them by keeping the object of their expedition be» fore their eyes; and after a halt has been called the story* teller is again in request to provide recreation; when, as likely as not, he will teil fables, parables, fairy»tales, each of them pointing a moral, and teaching the unsophisticated listener not only the way to face danger or the proper spirit in which to meet adversity, but also one's duties towards one's equals and superiors, tpwards friends and strangers. It must be considered matter for regret that the knowledge of such things should have been withheld from a thinker like Mill, as it would without any doubt have appealed to the utilitarian in him. But 'unhistorical' though his thinking was, he cannot have been ignorant of the posi* tion occupied by the Iliad in the Greek, and afterwards in the Hellenistic, world; of the fact that it constituted a spi* ritual bond uniting the Hellenes as nothing else did, and — that the Ancients resorted to it for practical purposes, consulting it as in the days of the Commonwealth a Puritan would consult his Bible. He must also have known some* thing about story «telling in the Middle Ages; how it was an art practised and appreciated everywhere, little as he might have agreed with Saintsbury, who holds (Hist. of Crit. I p. 473) that the 'Middle Ages created, or practically created, the Story', and that 'out of Herodotus, till we come to the very verge of the classical period with Apuleius and Lucian, it is almost impossible to find a Greek, quite impos* sible to find a Roman, who knows how to teil a story at



all'.") And of course Mill knew the narrative master*pieces of the eighteenth century, the stir they created, the influ* ence they exercised ,their great and perennial value for the historian. Were his sneers only provoked by secondrate novels? Was he, like most of us, rather too impatient of respectable mediocrity?
However this may be, it does seem a pity that he should also have been blind to the narrator's point of view, not as regards the turning of an honest penny, but with respect to the reliëf that 8tory*telling affords to the oppressed mind of the teller, burdened as it is with facts and fancies that clamour to be set free. This is the place to speak at some length about a mental need which is strong in all normal human beings, the need for communication.
In Birds and Man Hudson reports a remarkable state* ment made to him by a Somerset farmer concerning a fight he once witnessed between a raven and a peregrine falcon. 'The raven (op. cit.) p. 167) did not croak, but constantly uttered his harsh, powerful, barking cry, while the falcon emitted shrill, piercing cries that must have been audible two miles away. At intervals as they rose, wheeling round and round, they struck at each other, and becoming locked together feil like one bird for a considerable distance; then they would separate and mount again, shrieking and barking. At length they rose to so great a height that he feared to lose sight of them; but the struggle grew fiercer; they closed more often and feil longer distances, until they were near the earth once more, when they finally separated, flying away in opposite directions. He was afraid that the birds had fatally injured each other, but after two or three days he saw them again in their places. It was not possible for him, he told me, to describe the feelings he had while
17) Saintsbury praises the Odyssey, though he finds it somewhat deficiënt in passion. But 'the Iliad is such a bad story that it has tempted the profanity of those who would make it not one but a dozen stories; the ^Eneid is a story, dull a dormir debout as such, with some good rambling and fighting, a great descent to Hades, a capital boxing*match, not a bad regatta, and a famous but borrowed episode of passion.... Read Ovid (who had as much of the story>telling spiiit in him as any ancient except Herodotus), and then turn to what is often the mere doggerei and jargon of the mediaeval Latin storytellers in prose and verse. The gift, no matter whether it camc from the East or from the West is here and is not there'. (op. cit. p. 474).



watching the birds. It was the most wonderful thing he had ever witnessed, and while the fight lasted he looked round from time to time, straining his eyes and praying that some one would come to share the sight with him, and because no one appeared he was miserable.'
'I could well understand his feeling,' continues Hudson, who himself, on pp. 22*24 of A Hind in Richmond Park, in a chapter purporting to deal with 'atmospheric and wind senses', introducés a charming picture of a young lady bat* tling with the wind in a rocky path between walls of black* green furze', 'a subject that Whistier might have attempted', winding up with the, to us, very significant words: 'This incident has little or no bearing on the subject under discus* sion, and my only motive in introducing it is the common desire we all have of imparting to others anything wonderful or beautiful we have seen'.
Indeed, we are all of us, being sociable or gregarious, of the spiritual progeny of King Midas's barber. Let us listen to Hudson again: '[The impulse to communicate] has an old history, and begins in animals and man in a cry that calls attention to something seen, which eventually, when the human animal becomes articulate, shapes itself in words: 'I see something — come and look at itl' From this invitation to come and look at something seen we rise to the desire of exhibiting — conveying a feeling to others, and in the long result we have art in a multiplicity of forms, each giving a partial, never a full, satisfaction'. (p. 314 of A Hind in Richmond Park). The impulse is especially strong in children: 'Civilised and savage, from the polar regions tb the tropics and all the world over, whenever a few have met together they charter like starlings and parakeets about the things that interest them — whatever appeals to their sense of fun, of the novel, the grotesque, the beautiful. The little one who mimics his play*fellows and elders the best, or gives his relation in the most lucid and impressive manner, excites most laughter and interest in the others: and soon he discovers that he can make this interest greater by exaggerating and inventing. Hence the actor's and the story* teller's arts, and our Homer, Apuleius, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Swift, and the regiment of fictionists of the present time'. (op. cit. p. 310). We do not hesitate to make these words our own, adding moreover that those — and they are



numerous — who are for ever comparing poets to children, and to whom the childlike qualities which they detect in poets are so exceedingly significant, are always forgetting that a child is far more often trying to communicate an experience than it will ever soliloquize, and that, when it is seemingly indulging in a soliloquy, it is in reality addressing an imaginary audience. The more childlike a character a poet is, the greater his need for communication, which, in his case as in the child's, will be so nearly related to self* expression as to be practicaüy identical with it.
But we need not admit this 'resemblance' between poets and children. The present writer, for one, would rather side with Dilthey, whose view is (op. cit. p. 132): that between poet and ordinary man there are only differences of more and less; that the former's psychological reactions are in* tenser and of longer duration; that he experiences ('erlebt') more keenly, so that the storehouse of his memory is corre* spondingly richer") in all kinds of images which it is possible for him to group and combine in new, original ways; that he likewise remembers moods, which he knows how to reproduce by means of words and fictitious situations, so that his creative fantasy surpasses reality in its artistic results; and that in reproducing he simply cannot help exaggerating. 'Das ist das Merkmal des groszen Dichters, dass seine konstruktive Phantasie aus Erfahrungselementen, getragen von den Analogien der Erfahrung, einen Typus von Person oder Handlung hervorbringt, der über die Erf ah* rung hinausgeht und durch den wir diese doch besser be* greifen'. (op. cit. p. 139).
Closely allied to the impulse to exaggerate and invent, which so many children know how to put to use, is another important impulse, the impulse to experiment. It is not con* fined to human beings. Hudson has found it active among birds, in the Patagonian mocking*bird, in the European 'ouzel cock so black of hue with orange*tawny bill'. Such a bird 'throws out his notes anyhow, until in this haphazard way he hits on a sequence of notes, or phrase, that pleases him, and practises it with variations. Finalfy he may get fond of it and go on repeating it for days or weeks. Every individual singer is, so to speak, his own composer'.
") This conclusion is not only Dilthey's, but Ribot's as well.



(Adventures among Birds, p. 186). But if Karl Bücher is to be believed (Arbeit und Rhythmus, p. 389), things are essen* tially the same among the Negritos of the Andaman islands,19) and they are numbered among the most primitiYe tribes in the world.
Old effects constantly repeated grow stale and tedious every where, so that it will hardly be necessary for us to insist on the social and aesthetic value of experimenting. No matter how often it may result in failure, once in a while it will succeed and create something whose novel effects confer on it both acceptability and wonder.
We did not discuss rhythm in our preceding chapter, but we may as well state at once that it is as immaterial to our enquiry whether it derives from one factor or from more as it is a matter of indifference to the chemist whether the tears whose composition he analyzes were called forth by sorrowful news or by the dissection of an onion. A joke may make us laugh; so may tickling. Causes that are as un'ike as possible may produce virtially identical results. What matters is that our senses not only take pleasure in rhythm, but absolutely need it. Sometimes it is the charm of it that appears to be uppermost, — as when the eye follows the rolling ridges of the waves when the tide is at flow, — sometimes the need, as in marching, working in gangs, saying the multiplication*table in chorus, chanting litanies; but charm and need do not appear to be ever en* tirely dissociated. The eye always tries to interpret a land* scape rhythmically, — if unsuccessful in this it cannot 'accept' the spectacle and will pronounce it ugly; — the ear cannot help taking in a more or less regular succession of similar noises by 'grouping' them, as when we hear farm*
10) 'Jeder Andamanese dichtet und komponiert Gesange. Von einem Manne oder einer Frau, die das nicht vermochten, würde man wenig
halten. SJbst kleine Kinder sind dazu imstande. Wer einen Gesang 
komponieren will, tut das bei einer Arbcit, die ihn nicht aufregt oder zerstr:ut, indcm er es so lange damit versucht, bis er zufrieden und die Weise ihm gelaufig ist. Ist so das Lied bei der Körperbew gung entstanden, so tragt es der Komponist des Abends auf dem öffentlichen Tanzplatze vor, ist dabei aber anfangs etwas unsicher, bis nach wenigen Takten die gewohnte Begleitung (i.e. a chorus of m_n, women and children chiefly swaying and clapping hands) einsetzt. Dem Rhythmus zu Liebe verandern und kürzen die Andamanesen die Worte ihrer Sprache, sodasz man fast sagen kann, sie besaszen eine eigene Dichtersprache'.



labourers threshing corn with their flails. Speaking of vocal rhythm, Hudson (on p. 250 of A Hind in Richmond Park) maintains that it comes instinctively or automatically; 'it is a reliëf, a rest, which the impassioned speaker fans into naturally, which saves him from exhaustion, and has more* over an arresting effect on the hearers, thus adding to the power of the performance. Nor is it an aid in emotional speaking only; it extends into all sustained vocal expression;
it is in the crooning and murmuring sounds with which
the Indian mother puts her babe to sleep; in groaning, moan* ing and the sobbings of poignant grief, pain and misery, and more pronounced still in the lamentations for the dead. Thus, among savages of the pampas, it is the custom when a man dies for the women of the village to mourn his loss for the space of a whole night, moving in procession round the hut where the corpse Hes, with endless ululations, and the sounds grow rhythmical, and because of the rhythm the mourner's dreary task is lightened — if it does not become a positive pleasure.' (our italics.)
There is a certain rhythm — we might call it geometrical or arithmetical rhythm — which is common to innumerable stories, both in prose and in verse. It is found in its sim* piest form where one hero is charged with a threefold task or where an identical feat is attempted by three heroes — mostly brothers — in succession. The artistic possibilities of this apparently primitive device are great, and the present writer once had occasion to remark, in a little paper on Carl Sandburg, the American poet, that 'where the number three rules there is concentration, balance and form' But our present concern is no more with this kind of rhythm than it is with the much«vexed question whether lyric poetry or epic took precedence in order of time. Our business is only with the vocal rhythm that we find wedded to signifi* cant words wherever the art of mechanically multiplying what is written has not stepped in to lighten the load that memory has to carry. This vocal rhythm must have its origin in the 'rhythm of life' as such; in the diastole and systole of the heart; in the ebb and flow of the lungs; in the regular swing of the hips of a striding soldier. And though the ultimate secret may always elude us; though we may never succeed in satisfactorily correlating the appa* rently simple cause and its widely divergent effects; this



much at any rate experience has taught us: that obedience to the rhythmical impulse makes for economy.
Given the need for communication on the speaker's or the writer's part, there can be no doubt of the necessity he is under of economizing his hearer's or reader's atten* tion. For one thing, our intellect naturally disapproves of waste, which must, therefore, be considered ugly. For another, — and here we are re«echoing a view very persua* sively expounded by Herbert Spencer in his 'Philosophy of Style' — the amount of mental power at the disposal of a reader or listener at each moment is not unlimited, and the more trouble it is to interpret each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the thought and emotion it is intended to convey. According to Guyau, too, (APS p. 89) the reader's sympathetic emotion is always in inverse ratio to the amount of attention demanded from him. Hence the use — and beauty — of rhythmical structure. For it is an idealization of the natural language of strong emotion, and our expenditure of mental energy in listening or reading will be lessened, or even minimized, by 'the regular recur* rence of certain traits which the mind can anticipate'. (Sp. II. p. 39). This is proved by the faet that readers sensitive to rhythm will be balked by halting versification.
Those people — their number is not so very small — who can see nothing but artificiality in the form of verse, are wrong. It is a perfectly natural growth, to be met with all over the globe, among all races, peoples and tribes. But besides being this, it confers several benefits on writer and audience alike. For the economy of rhythm brings addition* al economy in its train. It makes for terseness, exposing prolixity which would go undetected in ordinary pedestrian prose. Its exhilarating effect is an incentive to the imagi* nation, suggesting fresh imagery to the writer, and com< pensating the reader for the omission of numerous words — conjunctive, modal, etc. — which would be indispensable in prose. The intellectual and emotional appeal of economie* ally transferred thought and feeling, together with the sensuous appeal of rhythm and imagery, compel that active acceptance without which, as our previous chapter has shown, there can be no aesthetic experience.
What is a story? It is the organic relation of a significant succession of events. Does it derive its pleasure*giving



power solely from incident, as Mill will have it? Hardly
since even very primitive stories contain attempts at char*
acter*drawing and transference of emotion. But granting
the possibility of such an extreme case in abstracto, we still
must maintain with Geoffrey Scott in his Architecture of
Humamsm (p. 156) that: «the aesthetic pleasure of surprise
may be a low one in the scale; but it is genuine, and not
necessanly ignoble; nay, we must point out that in this
respect it is exactly on a level with unsophisticated delight
in colours. And if the story hangs well together, and, as
an organic whole, commands our acceptance, it must be
considered beautiful. But even if a story counted for nothing
in itself even if it were only to be regarded as an excuse
tor poetical digressions, even then, being indispensable, it
must not be sneered at. Poetry, like every art, requires a
principle of permanence. No less than music or architec*
ture does it need «a theme to vary, a resisting substance to
work upon, a forrn to alter or preserve, a base upon which,
™* 1^lTatlon üaës, it may retire'. (Geoffrey Scott, op cit. p. 192). ' *
This resisting substance is furnished in descriptive poetry by nnpressions of things in space; in narrative poetry bv happenings in time. Any more fundamental differencê between the two genres there is none. Whoever, like Mill admits the raison d'être of the former, is in all consistency Dound to do the same thing in the case of the latter And experience has proved that of the two the narrative form is the more difficult one to work in.
4



CHAPTER V. Dieshards: First Group. Attempters of Epics.
§ 1. A warm day in spring, near a sunlit pool, with reeds sighing, insects buzzing, birds warbling. Presently a plop in the water, a few wrinkles, then again a surface as smooth as glass. The frog that caused the plop is now quietly floating, half supported by a bit of miniature driftwood, and probably intent on business of his own. But the reeds go on sighing, the insects keep buzzing, the birds have never stopped their several songs. Do finches and larks mind a frog, whether jumping, croaking, or lying in ambush?
When Mill contributed his "What is Poetry?" to the Monthly Repository he was only at the beginning of his career as a thinker. Modern readers of poetry are accus* tomed to visualize the young "thirties" as a rather barren patch separating the luxuriant fields of the early nineteenth century from the hardly less fruitful acres of Queen Victoria. But of the writing of verse there has never been an end, and members of the successive generations of song*smiths have always been apt to take themselves, and to profess to take each other, very seriously indeed, so that we may be sure that the Darleys, Motherwells, Blanchards and Lyttons of the time — not to mention Martin Tupper — were of one mind with Byron ("Don Juan", Ded. VII) in holding that
The field is universal and allows Scope to all such as feel the inherent glow, and that they were fully prepared to "try the question with posterity" against "Scott, Rogers, Campbell Moore, and Crabbe", not to mention small deer like Shelley and Keats, lately deceased in obscurity.
Certain it is that Mill's article — portentous though it may seem to us now — did not create much stir at the time. It led to no discussions in any of the leading period* icals; it was nowhere refer red to. Its writer gives, in his own'yluro&iograp/iy, only a passing mention of it, although he calls it "the most considerable" of his contnbutions to "the Monthly Repository, a magazine conducted by Mr. Fox" (op. cit p. 138), and though it was, in a somewhat



shortened form, duly reprinted on pp. 63—94 of Vol. I of his Dissertations and Discussions. (1867). We may presume that some disappointment at the apathy with which it had been received must have rankled in him, for we know from his own correspondence how anxious he was to hear the opinions of others about it.
In a letter to Thomas Carlyle, dated from "India House llth—12th April 1833", to be found on page 43 of The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I (1910) we read, "You will
have received long before this time two tracts of mine
of very different kinds, and the one I told you of long
ago, in Fox's periodical, on Poetry and Art. That last you promised me a careful examination and criticism of. I need it much, for I have a growing feeling that I have not got quite into the heart of that mystery, and I want you to show me how. If you do not teach me you will do what is better, put me in the way of finding out. But I begin to see a not yery far distant boundary to all I am qualified to accomplish in this particular line of speculation." Carlyle's reply, dated from Edinburgh (18th April, 1833) and contained in Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart Mill etc. (pp. 47, 48), can hardly have been particularly helpful: "doubt not, 'your Thoughts on Poetry and Art will deserve my fullest atten* tion: what I make of it you shall honestly hear. Alas, in these days, all light sportfulness and melodious Art, have fled away from us, far away; not in Poetry, but only if so might be in Prophecy, in stern old*Hebrew denunciation, can one speak of the accursed realities that now, and for generations, lie round us, weigh heavy on us! But we shall
not enter on this "
Nearly two months afterwards Carlyle confesses to Mill (op. cit. p. 57): "I simply love all Books that offer me the Experience of any man or men, that give me any fraction of the History of men; on this side nothing can be more catholic than my taste: but in return all Speculation is apt to be intolerable to me, except in two cases: when it is of the very highest sort; or when, as itself a historical do* cument, I find it interesting for the sake of its interesting author.... (p. 59) Doubt not.... that I carefully read your üttle Essay on Art. It is an honest considerate Essay: I do not properly dissent from anything in it; I would only add much to it. That characteristic you fix on is worthy of



noting; I find in it indeed a kind of relationship with that old Unconsciousness20) which, as Goethe hinted to me, is an element in most great things: however I do not figure it as the greaf characteristic. Would I could help you for* ward! But no man is less versed in logical Defining than I of late years; and perhaps one may doubt whether Poetry is a thing that Science can define. As for me I am accus* tomed to see some remains of meaning in that vulgarest of all notions that Poetry is Rhyme; and like almost better than any other form of speech to say to myself that Poetry is not poetical if it be not Musical; if it be not in thought, as in word, music. This is not good in Logic, but it helps me a little to know at least myself what I mean. As for the Germans (or rather the Kanteans with Schiller at their head), they seem to insist much on this as the grand criterion of Poetry, of Kunst in any kind: that there be an Unendlich; keit (Inftnitude) in it. To me this at first had next to no meaning; but year af ter year it has got more: do you also try it, and I predict for you the like. There are great depths in that matter, which is well worth thought. We shall speak of it in August.'
Mill's projected visit to the Carlyles did not come ott, and it is idle to speculate upon the loss which the world of letters must have suffered in consequence. But a few months later Mill sent to his Scotch friend a copy of the October number of the Monthly Repository, containing his article The Two Kinds of Poetry', which, as he says, he had written 'in further prosecution of, or rather improvement on', the thoughts he had published before on Poetry and Art It was accompanied by a letter expressing Mill's fear that Carlyle would not find much in it to please him, and that he would think it 'too much infected by mechamcal theories of the mind', going on 'yet you will probably in this, as in many other cases, be glad to see that out ot my mechanical premises, I elicit dynamic conclusions.... 1 don t care one straw about premises except for the sake ot con*
° When Carlyle received the copy of the Monthly Repository, Mill was in Paris, and whether the conclusions before*mentionedcommanded anyagreement or appreciation
») The italics in this quotation are all Carlyle's.



on the part of the recipiënt, is unknown. It is barely pos* sible that Carlyle's letter of acknowledgement has got lost. The letter he wrote Mill on the 28th of October 1833 is chiefly about the French Revolution, and about contem* porary English politics, the Whigs coming in for some very bitter censure. And with this we must take our leave of the two friends, and fix our attention on a man who — as ironie Time would have it — was to edit the same, often* mentioned, Monthly Repository from July 1836 to June 1837, and who, either undeterred by, or unaware of, anything Mill had written to rob epics of the right to rank as poetry, published, in 1843, an avowed epic: Orion.
§2. Richard Henry Home, the flamboyant figure who wrote it, was a gentleman*adventurer, a doer, as well as a man of letters, but those in whom this knowledge should induce a belief that therefore his poetry must have been dashed off in heaven*sent moments as strains of unpre* meditated art, would be very much mistaken. He himself declares — in his Brief Commentary to the ninth and 'defin* itive' edition of the poem (1872) — that it was 'intended to work out a special design, applicable to all times, by means of antique or ckssical imagery and associations; and this design, with the hero and the several characters who appear on the scène, as well as the general structure and distribution of the action, were long considered before a Üne was written.'
Here was, therefore, what theorists have termed a 'ground* work of thought', and if the matrix thus provided is a suitable one, we may reasonably expect that, granted favourable conditions, it will give birth to an epic, that is: to a special description of narrative poem, distinguished by length and grandeur, and by the heroic, more than mortal, mould in which its characters are cast. This defini* tion, which is in accordance with established usage, must not be taken to mean that the principal thing required is constant uniformity of pitch. Taking our stand on the law that we have already touched and commented upon in our fourth chapter, viz. the law of economy in art and letters, we may again insist here on the necessity for an author to economize his mental hearer's attention by providing not only variety of manner and matter, but variety of pitch. If he obeys this law, his reward will be twofold; for he will



retain his grip on the reader at the same time that he is enabled to give proper reliëf to the important parts of his story. Of course there will be the danger of an occasional anti«climax, but the risk should not be shirked if it is the price to be paid for the possibility of rising with one's subject whenever a climax is demanded by the progress of the story.
Before dealing with the general level of Orion, however, we must consider its design, and we may observe at once that the author owed but little of it to the meagre handful of facts transmitted to us by Apollodorus in his Bibliotheca. It was Horne who transplanted the wild Boeotian hunter to Chios, making of him a 'culture*hero', Horne it was who supplied him with six comrades, all of them 'claiming for their sires heroes, or kings or gods'; who invented the Merope incident, grafting on it an adapted version of one of the labours of Herakles, and substituting for a star a woman of flesh and blood; and who, in a way befitting a Victorian, was careful to leave out anything tending to his hero's discredit, such as his scurvy behaviour towards the Pleiades. The fact that the original meaning of a tradition in which tribal lore, animism and star*worship have got tied up into an inextricable knot, refused to be disentangled, must have been welcome to him, as he could now impose his own will upon it all.
On Horne's own avowal Orion is to be interpreted alle* gorically, or rather, symbolically:
There is an age of action in the world;
An age of thought; lastly, an age of both,
When thought guides action and men know themselves,
What they would have, and how to compass it
Yet are not these great periods so distinct
Each from the other, — or from all the rest
Of intermediate degrees and powers,
Cut off, — but that strong links of nature run
Throughout, and prove one central heart, wherein
Time beats twhvpulses with Humanity.
In every age an emblem and a type,
Premature, single, ending with itself,
Of loftier being in an after»time,
May germinate, develope, radiate,
And like a star go out and leave no mark
Save a high memory. One such is our theme 
The above linès, opening Book III (Canto the First)



supply the key to the poem and make the Brief Commenfary seem superfluous. We are presented with the very gradual transformation o£ a 'homo faber' into a 'homo sapiens', and watch, how, in his upward struggle, a literal case of 'per ardua ad astra', he is sometimes helped and served by his senses, and as often betrayed. Orion, the mighty giant, is the son of Poseidon and a woodnymph. Few are his years and few his needs. But one of these needs is imperious: he wants to be a maker and builder of things; and this he succeeds in becoming, thanks to the teaching and active assistance of Hephaistos and his Cyclopes. From being an artificer he becomes an artist and 'a hunter of shadows', a votary of abstract form, holding himself more and more aloof from his six fellows; Rhexergon, the breaker*down of things; Hormetes, the Stirrer*up of commotion; Harpax, 'in rapine taking great delight', 'forceful Biastor'; 'smooth Encolyon', the hinderer, 'the dull retarder, chainer of the wheel'; and the much revered Akinetos, 'the Great Un* moved', who
Since first the dawn Sat on his marble forehead, ne'er had gazed Onward with purpose of activity, Nor felled a tree, nor hollowed out a cave, Nor built a roof, nor aided any work, Nor heaved a sigh, nor cared for anything Save contemplation of the eternal scheme —
(Book I Canto II II. 20—26.)
One day Artemis crosses Orion's path — some living being appears to him the embodiment of the ideal — and love teaches him wisdom. But his earthly nature causes a barrier to rise between him and the object of his devotion: austere* fronted Artemis, exhorting his striving soul to leave the earth behind, and teaching his eager mind 'to reason on itself', ceases to satisfy him. Cold philosophy does not bring happinessto the student, neither will it enable him to alleviate the sorrows of others. He has other cravings, sensual ones — and aided by the other giants (with the inevitable exception of Akinetos) he organizes a wild orgy on the plain; romantic ones — and he falls in love with Merope, the daughter of king Oinopion, a princess with only sensuous beauty and passion to recommend her. Orion duly performs the task on whose fulfilment depends the fulfilment of his hopes. He



clears, mostly singlehanded, the woods and fens of Chios of carnivores and monsters, and when the king does not keep his promise, the Chian solitudes soon hear Orion declaim his woes to them, like any romantic hero to be found in Byron or in Chateaubriand:
'O, raging forest, do I seek once more
Your solitude for my secure abode?'
Orion cried, with wild arms cast abroad,
Fronting a tree whose branches lashed the air,
While its leaves showered around; — 'And shall I not
In your direct communion with the earth
And heavens, find sympathy [?]
Let me then shun
The baleful haunts of men — worse than the beasts
Whom I have exiled and to shadows changed —
Savage as beasts with less of open force;
As wily, with less skill and promptitude;
As little reasoning, save for selfish ends;
Less faithful, true, and honest, than the dog;
But hypocritical, which beasts are not,
Save in the fables which men make for them!
Into myself will I henceforth retire,
And find the world I dreamed of when a child.
Nor this alone; but worlds of higher mould
And loftier attributes shall roll before
My constant contemplation, in the cave
Of Akinetos, whom at times I '11 seek,
And emulate his wisdom; ever right
In never mo ving....
(Book II Canto II II. 269—275, 280—296.)
But his passion for Merope proves too strong for this seemingly wise resolve to be kept. Assisted by Rhexergon and Biastor he abducts the maiden, after which he lives with her in a palace of his own skilful building, standing in an enchanted wood of shady cedars, "with arching wrist and long extended hands", "while ever and anon the nightingale, not waiting for the evening, swells his hymn." The romantic escape inaugurates a honeymoon brimful of romantic senti* ment, which proves fatal to him: he is robbed of Merope and deprived of his eyesight. He can no longer be a homo faber, he can only ponder and mourn his loss. He is "reduced to ask for sympathy and to need help, stooping to pluck up pity from all soils." Even Akinetos, to whose cave he has groped his way, rises on perceiving Orion's blindness, rolls forth a stone with slow care, and places the blind giant by his side, speaking to him like this:



"My son, why wouldst thou ever work and buiit»
And so bestir thysclf, when certain grief,
Mischief, or error, and not seldom death,
Follows on all that individual will
Can of itself attain? I told thee this;
Nor for reproach repeat it, but to soothe
Thy mind with consciousness that not in thes
Was failure bom. Its law preceded thine:
It governs every act, which needs must fail —
I mean, give place — to make room for the next.
Each thinks he fails, because he thinks himself
A chain and centre, not a link that runs
In large and complex circles, all unknown.
Sit still. Remain with me. No difference
Will in the world be found: 't will know no change,
Be sure. Say that an act has been ordained?
Some hand must do it: therefore do not move:
An instrument of action must be found,
And you escape both toil and consequence,
Which run their rounds with restless fools; for ever
One act leads to another, and disturbs
Man's rest, and Reason — which foresees no end.'
(Book III Canto I ft. 125—146.)
In his terrible dejection Orion is within an inch of being converted to the philosophy of the Great Unmoved. But his nature proves stronger than his friend's logic. Akinetos having fallen asleep, Orion leaves him, each step he takes being a new experiment on a path beset by danger. He cannot afford more than one regretful glance backward at his lost love and at all that his romantic surrender to feeling seemed to promise him, which even included enlightenment as to things beyond the grave 
At length, one day, some shepherd as he passed, With voice that mingled with the bleat of lambs, Cried, 'Seek the source of light — begin anew!'
Nature tells Orion what to do, and Labour, in the shape of Brontes, the cyclops, guides his course eastward, to meet the Morning as she rises. And Eos, the bird«awakener and giver of fresh life,
The intermediate beauty that unites
The fierce Sun with the Earth, and moderates
His beams with dews and tenderness and smiles,
restores Orion's sight and receives him in her moving palace.



Grace and strength, With sense of happy change to finer earth, Freshness of nature, and belief in good, Came flowing o'er his soul, and he was biest
(Book III Canto II 11. 39—42.)
What though he succumbs in the last contest that Artemis, the jealous doctrinarian, wages for his possession with Eos, whose simple, unselfish love shares in Orion's every design, feeling and wish? Zeus turns him into a consteUation, a shining example for all posterity, whereas all his former companions have come to bad ends; Harpax, Hormetes and Encolyon having been burnt up by Phoibos; Rhexergon and Biastor having lost their lives raging among mankind; and Akinetos, the Great Unmoved, having been petrified in his cave. The final victory is with Orion, and the appropri* ateness of the ending there will be few to deny, much though opinions may differ, both as regards the qualities of the hero — whether 'epic' or no — and with respect to the effect* iveness of the allegory.
It may at once be conceded that Orion is a 'hero' of a very different stamp from the epic figures generally accepted as such, from a Beowulf, a Diomed, a Ulysses, supermen, either self*reliant to a fault, or, at most, only looking to be aided by 'immortals' who are little else than their votaries' own deified virtues, such as courage, resourcefulness and pru* dence. When first confronted by Artemis and her bow, Orion, it is true, is not unheroic, but the chief impression he makes is that of a strapping, goodlooking lad, very attract* ive in his modest simplicity and guileless trust, dreading no consequence, forgetting all danger. When the goddess begins to educate him, he makes her the most docile of pupils, his soul striving hard 'to ascend and leave the earth behind.' He does not rebel when in her desperate attempt to make him 'all spirit' she compels him to become a vegetarian. But the distance between the two does not appreciably diminish, and his earthly, sensuous nature, too austerely repressed, is revenged upon him and asserts itself in the orgy, a veritable act of despair. Conquering his hopeless love for Artemis by the very human but quite unheroic method of displacement, Orion loses more and more of his stature in our eyes and hardly redeems it by his Herculean exploit of ridding Chios of monsters. After all, modern man is familiar with the use of fire in scaring away wild animals. Still it is a kind of



rehabilitation, especially after his comrades have been disa* bied, and so is, after his romantic vapourings in the tempest* shaken forest, his abduction of Merope; but all this is undone by his subsequent blindness, for which he has only himself to thank — he is not watchful, as Ulysses or Beo* wulf would have been, — by Akinetos' pitying act of kind* ness in seating the blind giant on a stone, and — by the way in which Eos, by a mere act of grace, restores his eyesight to him.
All this may be granted, and yet, when we approach the question from another angle, when we envisage Orion's career against the background furnished by English political and social movements in the 'thirties' and 'forties', our opinion is quite likely to change again. The period referred to saw the passing of the Reform Bill, the rise and collapse of Chartism, the inception and publication of Disraeli's polit* ical novels Coningsby and Sybil. It also saw (1841—1843) Horne occupied with official duties connected with the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children. Horne, the traveller who had seen many lands and cities, and had learned the ways of many people, was a living proof that a detached, philosophical view of abuses, movements, parties and persons is quite compatible with a keen interest in it all. And his poem is largely a demonstration of the ever*unpalat* able truth: that the pure gold of the ideal refuses to be hammered into shape without a considerable admixture of base metal, and that the form into which it is wrought cannot be ideal either, because it is impossible to prevent unworthy hands from handling the hammers. Given an important social or political issue, we shall see how, in the natural course of events, a certain number of men standing out from the common ruck press forward, eager to assume the respon» sibiHties of leadership, eager too, more often than not, for the opportunities thus provided to gratify base desires and compass selfish ends. Of such are Horne's Harpaxes and Biastors, and in drawing them he must have had, if not in the bright field of his full consciousness, at any rate at the back of his head, — certain figures of contemporary politics, where he saw unselfish idealists like Henry Vincent and Ernest Charles Jones rub shoulders with an adventurer like Feargus O'Connor, the descendant of an Irish royal house, of gigantic stature and strength, man of fashion (or 'buck')



and — mob orator. For the portrait of Encolyon, too, any politician may have sat who — like Seithenyn in Peacock's story The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829) — held 'that there is nothing so dangerous as innovation', and who, with Sydney Smith, ridiculed Rowland Hill's proposals which, in spite of divers Encolyons, were carried into effect in 1840. Philosophically minded people, who, like the Great Un« moved, shrink from any and every kind of responsibility, cannot have been lacking then any more than they are lacking now. And remote as the theme of Orion may appear to us at first sight, we must agree not only that it smacks of the time and was called forth by the time in which it originated, but also that the truths embodied in its imagery are of lasting value and interest.
We observed before that the poem is symbolical rather than a consistent allegory; we trust that from the preceding discussion this has now become clear. Allegory is the telling of one story in terms of another. It is a kind of poetic algebra: once we know the values of x, y, and z, everything is plain, and those who sneer at allegory for being what it is, forget that the genre numbers such undoubted masterpieces as Absalom and Achitophel, A Tale of a Tub, and A Pib grim's Progress. But we call a book symbolical: first, when — either in parts or as a whole — it admits of more than one interpretation, not according to the conscious intention of the author, (as in the case of Edmund Spenser), but accord» ing to the position and mood of the reader, who may, indeed, be vaguely aware of sufeconscious intentions on the author's part; and secondly, when it contains extraneous matter, such as descriptions for description's sake, in which the underlying meaning of the story is, for the time being, lost. It is a practice in which Bunyan does not indulge; he never troubles to describe Doubting Castle as it appeared to the pilgrims after their rude awakening; and Giant Despair is just a giant, and the author leaves it at that. But Horne's description of Artemis' train, charming though it is, must be pronöunced purely extraneous, in that it does not carry the 'allegory' any further. On the other hand, it affects us as a mythological painting by Titian or Correggio might do....
from the misty green afar,
In silence did the Goddess' train appear Rounding a thicket. Slow the crowding hounds



Tript circling onward; Nymphs with quivered backs,
And clear elastic limbs of nutebrown hue,
Or like tanned walMruit, ripening and compact;
And shortshorncd Fauns down gazing on their pipes;
And Oceanides with tresses green
Plaited in order, or by golden nets
In various device confined, each bearing
Shell lyres and pearkmouthed trumpets of the sea;
Dryads and Oreads decked with oakdeaf crowns
And heath-.bclis 
(Book I Canto II 11. 136—148.)
Towards the close of the same canto, after Orion has come upon Artemis asleep in her cave and stolen away on tip»toe, we find the foliowing bit of description:
There was a slumbrous silence in the air, By noonstide's sultry murmurs from without Made more oblivious. Not a pipe was heard From field or wood; but the grave beetle's drone Passed near the entrance: once the cuckoo called O'er distant meads, and once a hom began Melodious plaint, then died away. A sound Of murmurous music yet was in the breeze, For silver gnats that harp on glassy strings. And rise and fall in sparkling clouds, sustained Their dizzy dances o'er the seething meads.
(Ibid. 11. 265—275.)
It is charming, it is beautiful, it is worthy of Keats, — and it must be taken just as it is, without any underlying sym* bolism being sought. We may safely affirm as much of the orgy in the plain and the extermination of the Chian mon* sters. When Horne tells us that the wine ran wastefully, bubbling and leaping over the ears of the tall jars that stood too near the fire, and streaming in crimsoning foam, he means wine and nothing else. When the Chian monsters pursued by Orion have plunged into the sea, where Poseidon draws them swirling down, it is idle to bother about the allegorical significance of the dragon that is the last to sink, the oldest dragon of the fens whose 'forky flagswings and horn«crested head' had held regal sway over crags and marshes. When Orion sleeping near the sea is stalked and blinded by Oinopion's emissaries, we are presented with nothing but realism:
Forth from a dank chasm issue figures armed. Close conference they hold, like ravens met



For ominous talk of death. No more: their shields, Flumed helms, and swords, two chieftains lay aside, Then stoop, and sof tl y creep tow'rds him who sleeps; While o'er their heads the long protecting spears Are held by seven, who noiselessly and slow Follow their stealthy progress. Step by step The deadly crescent moves behind the train, Who, flat as reptiles, and with face thrust out, Breathless, all senses sharpen....
(Book II Canto III 1L 364—374)
It is realism which, here and repeatedly, rises to epic heights, without succeeding in making the whole poem an epic. Nevertheless, it is a splendid achievement, written throughout with the author's eye on the object, which was the story as such; a thoroughly original work which, prac* tically, never flags, and which — epic heights apart — never falls below a very high general level. For upwards of thirty years no English poem appeared which could fairly claim to be its legitimate successor. Then, however, the year 1876 saw the publication of The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs.
§3. William Morris, its author, was, like Horne, much more than a mere literary man, but we are no more con* cerned here with his career as a decorator and a printer than with Horne's exploits on the Spanish Main and in Australia. Nor is our attention engaged by the reception 'Sigurd' met with on being brought out. It would be easy to cull a certain number of laudatory critiques, but this does not alter the fact that the public remained lukewarm. As late as 1892 — four years before Morris's death — it was even possible for Mrs. Oliphant, who (in the first volume of her Victorian Age in English Literature) had dismissed Horne as a 'graceful and delightful minor poet', to sneer at Morris's preoccupation with Northern sagas without ever mentioning the title of his magnum opus. For his magnum opus it is, more than Jason with its smoothly versified romanticism, and far more than The Earthly Paradise, with its numerous languors.
Whereas Horne had elaborated a meagre handful of data furnished by a guardian of Greek mythological lore, filling as he did so his scanty material with a symbolical content that it had originally lacked, Morris found, ready to his hand, a Teutonic tradition which, though somewhat garbled



in places, was as full as a poet could but wish, and which, as a story, — or rather as a concatenation of four stories — needed but little arrangement. We will distinguish the four — with Heusler in Hoops's Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, III p. 314 — as: the career of Sigmund the Volsung; the adventures of young Sigfrid or Sigurd; the Brynhild saga; and the destruction of the Burgunds by Attila.21) In Morris's epic they appear as four 'Books', called Sigmund, Regin, Brynhild, and Gudrun, each of them subdivided into sections bearing special headings, the whole poem running to upwards of three hundred and fifty pages of fairly close print.
Seldom has a poet laid his students under a heavier obligation than Morris has done in this case, by enabling them to compare his raw material with his achievement. In 1870 — having studied Old Norse for about ten years with an Icelandic scholar — he published, in collaboration with his teacher, Eirikr Magnüsson, a translation of a somewhat composite character, entiled 'Völsunga Saga', of which a popular reprint, edited by H. Halliday Sparling, was issued by the Walter Scott Publishing Company in 1888. The book opened with a preface, in which the translators, 'in offering to the reader (their version) of the most complete and dramatic form of the great Epic of the North', disclaimed any 'special critical insight', being content to abide by existing authorities and leaving vexed questions alone. But
M) 'Diese Reihe als Ganzes hat nur die isl. Volsunga saga verwirk* licht; in der Thidhreks saga finden wir II—IV, aber nach ungleichen Quellen und nicht als fortlaufende Geschichte; im Nibelungenlied III und IV (auf II nur Rückblicke). I und II hingen ursprünglich nur durch den Stamm» baum, kein episches Band zusammen: dass Sigfrid des Vaters Schwert erbt und den Vater racht, ist erst nordische Dichtung. II wirkt in III
nach, sofern Sigfrid mit dem Horte und dem Ruhme seiner Jugend»
taten ausgestattet ist: ein festeres Band knüpfte erst die spatere isl.
Dichtung Aber noch in der alten eddischen Schicht sind III and IV
fast nur durch die Personen und den Hort verbunden, die können eines ohne das andre schliessen und anfangen; von einer 'Verschmelzung' der Sigfriddichtung mit der Burgundensage kann man erst reden, nachdem
diese letzte zur Gattenrache gewandelt wurde das Nibelungenlied
zeigt III und IV in der Tat als Halften einer Fabel, die nun an Reichtum des Grundrisses alle übrigen germanischen Heldensagen weit übertrifft... Als Heimat dieser Sagen hat nach Privatnamen und den Sagenquellen
selbst das niederrheinische Franken zu gelten. IV wird nicht allzulange
nach 453 entstanden sein, die Walthersage übernimmt schon das Paar Gunther.Hagen.' (op. cit. 314, 315).
63



they claimed to have done their utmost to make the first English rendering of this great work 'close and accurate, and, if it might be so, at the same time not oversprosaic', their appeal being rather 'to the lover of poetry and nature than to the student'. And they were confident that such a reader would break through 'whatever entanglement of strange manners' might at first trouble him, and that he would be 'intensely touched by finding, amidst all its wild* ness and remoteness, such startling realism, such subtilty, such close sympathy with all the passions that may movè
himself to«day For this is the Great Story of the North,
which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks'. (our italics).
What Morris and Magnüsson proceed to give then is, headed by a very complete list of 'dramatis personae', first, the Old Norse prose story, 'composed probably some time in the twelfth century, from floating traditions no doubt; from songs which, now lost, were then known, at least in fragments, to the Sagaman; and finally from songs, which, written down about his time, are still existing'; and secondly, in addition to the poems and poetical fragments which the Icelandic author had already inserted in his saga — such as Brynhild's 'wise redes to Sigurd', taken from the Lay of Sigrdrifa — several Eddaic poems, partly inserted in the text — such as the Lays of Regin and Fafnir, and the first Lay of Gudrun, 'the most lyrical, the most complete and the most beautiful of all', — partly placed in a bunch at the end, among which we find such important productions as the latter part of the second Lay of Helgi Hunding's Bane and the Hell«ride of Brynhild.
Behold Morris now in ecstasy before a famous Northern story, the general drift of which — thanks, partly, to his own labours — is as welhknown to the average cultured reader of to*day as it was unfamiliar to his earlysVictorian prede* cessor. It was the great story of the Teutonic race, and he had given it to the English*speaking world in the completest form available. Why was he not satisfied to leave it at that? Why must he needs proceed to rehandle it after his own fashion and heart?
In 1871 he first visited Iceland, fully prepared, thanks to his previous studies, to fall in love with this austere and forbiddingslooking spot of ground, this Brynhild among



countnes. And fall in love with it he did. And, — unlike his own Sigurd, and unlike so many Northern adventurers from Alaric down to Tancred — when, two years afterwards, he went to Italy, he found, in the much vaunted South, little to please him and no glamour at all. On the contrary, hating and detesting both Roman Empire and Renascence, he turned to the North again, back to Iceland. And the book he had helped to compile about Volsungs and Niblungs became to him a kind of obscure or misty medium, which, lifting and brightening in places, allowed him occasional glimpses at first, visions by and by, of the tale as it might, or must, or should' have been; of its ideal version, selfcconsistent and integral] which, accordingly, he would endeavour to give to the world! We may feel convinced nowadays that no such version ever existed; that the tale, a tradition of the Southern Teutons, had wandered Northward in a very imperfect form before the story of Sigfrid and that of the Niblungs had been welded together, with historical loss but poetical gain, into the consistent unity of the German Nibelungenlied, in which the Ostrogothic bias in favour of Attila is so con* spicuous; that dozens of skalds must have added to it, tinkered at it, or even spoilt it. But we may feel equally convinced that Morris was unacquainted with most of this higher criticism', and that a knowledge of it would have been unable to dissuade him from his opinion or to deter him from his undertaking.
Yet the imperfections of the version he had made access* ïble to the British public were patent to him, too. Or, rather deeply as he might have steeped himself in Northern feeling and Odinism, there were certain things in the story against which the Victorian in him, or rather the nursling of civihzation and Christianity, could not help rebelling; things therefore, which, being incompatible with his ideal vision ot it all, had to go by the board. Such is, first of all the treatment meted out to the bairns. Surely that is a barbarous a monstrous world in which a mother — let her be as much of a Volsung as she pleases — in avenging her father and brothers sacrifices her own children, nay, compasses their deaths, or even murders them out of hand, instead of doinö what historical Ildicho did to historical Attila. And we are srniply astounded to see that the same Gudrun, who has not only a glonous husband, Sigurd, but also an innocent son,



Sigmund, to avenge — and never does — becomes a loath» some personification of inhuman vindictiveness after Atli's murder of her brothers Gunnar and Hogni.22) The nine* teenth century German poet who has rehandled the same matter of the Niblungs in his own fashion — Wilhelm Jordan — exclaims against all the cheap horrors with which his sources abourid, attributing them to the unscrupulous inventiveness of atrocity*mongers pandering to the perverted taste of a degenerate age and audience.2Ï) And it does not matter whether, as is most likely, the question is not quite as simple as Jordan represents it, and whether mythic moüfs that were no longer unterstood — some of them Greek, perhaps — may have heen responsible for a number of crudities that fill us, moderns, less with horror than with disgust. What matters is that both the modern German poet and his English contemporary cut out all this sanguinary stuff as worthléss, not out of regard for their prospective
M) Compare: 'But Gudrun forgat not her woe, but brooded over it, how she might work some mighty shame against the king; and at nightfall she took to her the sons of King Atli and her as they played about the floor; the younglings waxed heavy of cheer, and asked what she would with them
"Ask me not," ahe said; "ye shall die, the twain of you!"
Then they answered, "Thou mayest do with thy children even as thou wilt, nor shall any hinder thee, but shame there is to thee in the doing of his deed."
Yet for all that she cut the throats of them.
Then the king asked where his sons were, and Gudrun answered, "I will teil thee, and gladden thine heart by the telling; lo now, thou didst make a great woe spring up for me in the slaying of my brethren; now hearken and hear my rede and my deed; thou hast lost thy sons, and their heads are become beakers on the board here, and thou thyself hast drunken the blood of them blended with wine; and their hearts I took and roast^d them on a spit, and thou hast eaten thereof.' (op. cit. p. 147). *») Compare his Hildebrand's words to the King of Norway: Gelüstet es euch, in breitem Liede Das alles auf's Haar mit Henkerwollust, Weit scheusslicher noch als es wirklich geschehen Durch Zuthat verzerrt erzahlen zu hören, So wimmelt's ja schon von wandernden Sangern In Schwammels Manier im benachbarten Schweden Die der Niblunge Noth für geneigte Lauscher Zu Mordgeschichten zurechtgemetzgert Von deren einem lasst euch bedienen
Wenn ihr anders denket als Ich 
(Hildebrants Heimkehr, XVIII 1L 46—55).



audiences, but from a genuine feeling of solidarity with them.
The following point to be considered is Morris's treatment and use of the marvellous, which looms so large in the original story of Sigurd and Regin, and only a little less so in that of Sigmund and Sinfiotli. It seems advisable to draw at once a rough line of division between the marvellous properly so called, the marvellous feit as such from the outset, and certain welMcnown superstitions proper to de? finite stages of human development, such as the wide*spread belief in lycanthropy. Whereas the latter kind may be retained without any qualms on the part of a modern rehandler, the former must be either discarded, or — if organically inherent in and indispensable to the story — toned down. And this is, in fact, what Morris has done.
While retaining the apparitions of Odin, the temporary change of Sigmund and Sinfiotli into wolves, and the shape* shifting of Signy and the 'witchwife', likewise certain time* honoured romantic requisites, such as love*philtres and dreams, besides Brynhild's enchantment, Andvari's fateful hoard, and, of course, the dragon and the prophesying birds, — he recognised that there are limits not only to the 'willing suspension of unbelief' but also to the assurance which an epic poet can summon to himself in relating such impossibik ities. In a poem like Horne's Orion the marvellous, being symbolical, is acceptable. But in a non*allegorical epic poem even a slight overdose of the marvellous is apt — the Odys* sey is a case in point — to spoil or destroy wnat epic qualities it may possess. And Morris must nave experienced a feeling of great reliëf when, after doing his duty by the marvels of the Volsunga saga, not in any half*hearted way, but yet with discretion, he could turn his attention to the almost exclusively human and far more tragic entanglement of the Niblung story.
The capture of the three gods, Odin, Hamir and Loki, by Reidmar the Eoten (to adopt a convenient Old^English spelling for Jotunn) and his sons Fafnir and Regin, may have offered less difficulty of treatment than most of the rest. Gods will be Gods and Eotens Eotens, doing after their kind, and who shall presume to circumscribe their powers or scope? Morris had a free hand here by all literary laws whether ancient or modern, and he had a quick eye for suitable stuff — outside the Volsunga saga — to be appro*



priated for his purpose; witness the way in which he depicts Odin, whom he endows with every feature and quality that is likely to impress a modern reader, up to the climax of the mystical verses of the Havamal (str. 137) telling how 'Odin hung on the windy tree for nine whole nights, stabbed with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself' 
'Who hath learned the names of the Wise»one or measured out his will?
Who hath gone before to teach him, and the doom of days fulfil? 
For myself to myself I offered, that all wisdom I might know, And fruitful I waxed of works, and good and fair did they grow. And I knew, and I wrought and fore»ordered; and evil sat by my side, And myself by myself has been doomed '
But it is with the subsequent vicissitudes of Regin especi* ally that Morris deals in a fashion that may be pronounced masterly. Regin, the least regarded of Reidmar's three sons, unwarlike Regin, the smith, the artificer who, his father having been murdered by Fafnir, the eldest son, suffered himself to be driven away — or, rather, scared away — by his brother from the splendid hall he had built with his own hands, had to find refuge in the world of men, and the poet represents him as having become all but humanized in their society. But something uncanny still attachés to him, some* thing reminiscent of his descent from the 'DwarMolk'; and we may observe here that Morris uses the term 'Dwarf' throughout instead of Eoten, obviously for the sinister suggestiveness of the word, which seems to make the shape* shifting of those awesome beings a thing to be unquestion* ingly accepted. And Morris knows well how to bring out those sinister, uncanny features, when he shows us Regin in the function of Sigurd's tutor, and especially so when 'the Master of Sleight, beardless and low of stature, of visage pinched and wan', tells the golden*haired, guileless youth, who is eagerly listening, of his expulsion by his terrible brother, Fafnir, before whom he trembled, 'for he wore the Helm of Dread, and his sword was bare in his hand':
'More awful grew his visage as he spake the word of dread, And no more durst I behold him, but with heart a»cold I fled; I fled from the glorious house my hands had made so fair, As poor as the new»born baby with nought of raiment or gear: I fled from the heaps of gold, and my goods were the eager will, And the heart that remembereth all.and the hand that may never be still.



Then unto this land I came, and that was long ago As men-folk count the years; and I taught them to reap and to sow, And a famous man I became: but that generation died, And they said that Frey had taught them, and a God my name did hide. Then I taught them the craft of metais, and the sailing of the sea, And the taming of the horse-kind, and the yoke-beasts' husbandry, And the building up of houses; and that race of men went by, And they said that Thor had taught them; and a smithying-carle was I. Then I gave their maidens the needie and bade them hold the rock, And the shuttle*race gaped for them as they sat at the weaving*stock. But by then these were waxen crones to sit dim*eyed by the door, It was Freyia had come among them to teach the weavingJore. Then I taught them the tales of old, and fair songs fashioned and true, And their speech grew into music of measured time and due, And they smote the harp to my bidding, and the land grew soft and sweet: But ere the grass of their grave<mounds rose up above my feet, It was Bragi had made them sweefemouthed, and I was the wandering scald....'
Defrauded of his rights, of the fame that is his due, and hungry for recognition and power, he falls to the dreaming of dreams, in which he makes himself master of Fafnir's hoard; and here Morris shows subtle psychological insight in representing Regin as idealizing and justifying his purpose:
' some day I shall have it all, his gold and his craft and his heart...
And then when my hand is upon it, my hand shall be as the spring
To thaw his winter away and the fruitful tide to bring.
It shall grow; it shall grow into summer, and I shall be he that wrought,
And my deeds shall be remembered, and my name that once was nought;
Yea, I shall be Frey, and Thor, and Freyia, and Bragi in one:
Yea the God of all that is, — and no deed in the wide world done,
But the deed that my heart would fashion: and the songs of the
freed from the yoke Shall bear to my house in the heavens the love and the longing of folk. And there shall be no more dying, and the sea shall be as the land, And the world for ever and ever shall be young beneath my hand.'
Even covetous and cowardly Regin must needs vindicate his aspirations to himself and his one auditor; he can be an idealist on occasion. And for this profounder content, this psychologische Veriiefung, Morris was not indebted at all either to the Reginsmal or to the Volsunga saga. It is all his own. Was it contrary to Old Norse sentiment, as contrary as Morris's omission of the vengeance Sigurd takes on Sig* mund's slayers? 'So much the worse for Old Norse senti* ment,' would most probably have been our Victorian poet's rejoinder. The modern artist in him could not put up with a



revenge that he feit to be an anticlimax: after Sigurd's mind has been prepared for a great enterprise and the best of swords has been put into his hand, the story must proceed to business, to the fight with the dragon. There must be no interruption for the sake of a mere bloodsfeud of some eighteen years' standing.
But an adequate handling of such a combat would tax any modern poet's powers to the utmost. Morris, being a Victo* rian, cannot take a mere dragon seriously, and he dearly wishes to avoid ridicule. So he provides a scène and back* ground where anything might happen, a suitable framework to hold a dragon, and that background with its appropriate atmosphere is furnished by Iceland:
Day-long they fared through the mountains, and that high-way's fashioner Forsooth was a fearful craftsman, and his hands the waters were, And the heaped>up ice was his mattock, and the fire»blast was his man, And never a whit he heeded though his walls were waste and wan, And the guest-halls of that wayside great heaps of the ashes spent But, each as a man alone, through the sun-bright day they went 
Day-long they rode the mountains by the crags exceeding old. And the ash that the first of the Dwarf-kind found dull and
quenched and cold. Then the moon in the mid-sky swam, and the stars were fair and pale, And beneath the naked heaven they slept in an ash=grey dale;
So up and up they journeyed, and ever as they went About the cold-slaked forges, o'er many a cloud-swept bent, Betwixt the walls of blackness, by shores of the fishless meres, And the fathomless desert waters, did Regin cast his fears, And wrap him in desire; and all alone he seemed As a God to his heirship wending....
So on they ride to the westward, and huge were the mountains grown
And the floor of heaven was mingled with that tossing world of stone:
And they rode till the moon was forgotten and the sun was waxen low,
And they tarried not, though he perished, and the world grew dark below.
Then they rode a mighty desert, a glimmering place and wide,
And into a narrow pass high»walled on either side
By the blackness of the mountains, and barred aback and in face
By the empty night of the shadow; a windless silent place:
But the white moon shonc o'erhead mid the small sharp stars and pale.
And each as a man alone they rode on the highway of bale.
So ever they wended upward, and the midnight hour was o'er, And the stars grew pale and paler, and failed from the heaven's floor. And the moon was a long while dead, but where was the promise of day? No change came over the darkness, no streak of the dawning grey;



No sound of the wind's uprising adown the night there ran:
It was blind as the Gaping Gulf ere the first of the worlds began.
But lo, at the last a glimmer, and a light from the west there came,
And anothtr and another, like points of far«off flame;
And they grew and brightened and gathered; and whiles together they ran
Like the moon wake over the waters; and whiles they were scant and wan,
Some greater and some lesser, like the boats of fishers laid
About the sea of midnight; and a dusky dawn they made,
A faint and glimmering twilight: So Sigurd strains his eyes.
And he sees how a land deserted all round about him lies
More changeless than mid»ocean, as fruitless as its floor:
Then the heart leaps up within him, for he knows that his journey is o'er,
And there he draweth bridle on the first of the Glit tering Heath....
Odin appears. Instructed by him Sigurd a tracks Fafnir from a deep hole, dug by him in the slot the dragon has made for himself in his regular goings to his drinkingsplace. A weird element introduced by Morris is the apparition of an unknown face, grinning and blear?eyed, — Reidmar's face presumably — to Sigurd lurking in his ambush. But it does not say a word, 'and departeth leaving nothing save the dark', and we feel somewhat defrauded, since such an incident surely should have proved more pregnant, more productive of results. The description of the fight, if fight it can be called, is rather hurried. Evidently Morris's heart was not in the business. Nor was it in the colloquy between the dying Fafnir and his slayer, for which his originals had furnished the refractory materials. The poet treats us to a süchomyth2*) that is ineffective and at places absurd or, to modern minds, incomprehensible. He can write good gnomic verse enough, and Brynhild's discourses to Sigurd furnish some notable examples, but the wisdom of which Fafnir delivers himself yields at best a few Swinburnian paradoxes:
'I have seen the Gods of heaven, and their Norns withal I know: They love and withhold their helping, they hate and refrain the blow; They curse and they may not sunder, they bless and they shall not blend; They have fashioned the good and the evil; they abide the change and the end.'
Regin's eulogies had prepared us for something better than this, and the heart of such a platitudinous dragon
") Why süchomuthia, when we also have metonymy?



seems hardly worth cooking and eating. But nobody can deny that Regin's subsequent fate is told with spirit and elevation, and that it was a bold and successful stroke of Morris to transfonn the original woodpeckers — or titmice — singing their warnings to Sigurd the cookboy into seven eagles, whose chants will persuade any unsophisticated reader that it is Sigurd the epic hero, Odin's darling, that ought to have the treasure, and not the uncanny wight who has met with his just deserts, Regin the artificer, slain by the youngster he trained and the invincible weapon he forged.
And now the story takes us to the 'Shield;burg' where mailsclad Brynhild lies in deep sleep, punished by Odin for disobedience. She is delivered by Sigurd as was foretold, and they betroth themselves to each other. Brynhild, for all her previous disobedience, is represented by the saga as the wisest of women, likewise by the Sigrdrifumal, and each story*teller has feit it incumbent on him to corroborate his statement by subjoining wise sayings alleged to have been uttered by Brynhild. From a modern point of view these 'redes' are all disappointing, the 'poetical' ones of the Lay even more so than those given by the prose saga. What was Morris the Victorian to do with practical hints (or tips) like
Run es of war know thou,
If great thou wilt be!
Cut them on hilt of hardened sword,
Some on the brand's back,
Some on its shining side,
Twice name Tyr therein.
Seasrunes good at need,
Learnt for ship's saving,
For the good health of the swimming horse;
On the stern cut them,
Cut them on the rudder*blade ?
(Op. cit. 71)
It is obvious that our poet could have no use for this sort of thing. But the prose stuff, although hardly inferior to many of the Biblical proverbs attributed to King Soloinon, is little better:
'Be kindly to friend and kin, and reward not their tres» passes against thee; bear and forbear, and win for thee thereby long enduring praise of men.



'Take good heed of evil things: a may's love, and a man's wife; full oft thereof doth ill befalll
'Let not thy mind be overmuch crossed by unwise men at thronged meetings of folk; for oft these speak worse than they wot of; lest thou be called a dastard, and art minded to think that thou art even as is said; slay such an one on
another day, and so reward his ugly talk '
(op. cit. p. 76)
If thou hearest the fool's word of a drunken man, strive not with him being drunk with drink and witless; many a grief, yea, and the very death groweth from out such things.
'Fight thy foes in the field, nor be burnt in thine house 
'Give kind heed to dead men, — sick=dead, sea=dead, or sword«dead; deal heedfully with their dead corpses.
'Trow never in him for whom thou hast slain father, brother, or whatso near kin; yea, though young he be; for oft waxes wolf in youngling ' (op. cit. p. 77)
Sancho Panza, being a connoisseur, might have been impressed by this kind of proverbial lore, which, no doubt, was familiar to any granny in ancient Norway. But no' Sigurd Fafnir's Bane worthy of a modern's esteem would, on the strength of the above saws, have proposed to Bryn* hild, declaring that none among the sons of men could be found wiser than she was. And again Morris does not force this stuff down his readers' throats claiming admiration for genuine old Norse sentiment accurately rendered. He makes his heroine discour se as follows:
"Strive not with the fools of man»folk: for belike thou shalt overcome; And what then is the gain of thine hunting when thou bearest the' quarry home?
Or else shall the fooi overcome thee, and what deed thereof shall grow? Nay, strive with the wise man rather, and increase thy woe and his woe; Yet thereof a gain hast thou gotten; and the half of thine heart hast thou won
If thou may'st prevail against him, and his deeds are the deeds thou hast done;
Yea, and if thou fall before him, in him shalt thou live again. And thy deeds in his hand shall blossom, and his heart of thine hear* shall be fain.
"When thou hearest the fooi rejoicing, and he saith, *It is over and past, And the wrong was better than right, and hate turns into love at the last, And we strove for nothing at all, and the Gods are fallen asleep; tor so good is the world a-growing that the evil good shall reap:' rhen loosen thy sword in the scabbard and settle the helm on thine head, for men betrayed are mighty, and great are the wrongfully dead.



"Wilt thou do the deed and repent it? thou hadst better never been born; Wilt thou do the deed and exalt it? then thy fame shall be outworn: Thou shalt do the deed and abide it, and sit on thy throne on high. And look on today and tomorrow as those that never die.
"Love thou the Gods — and withstand them, lest thy fame should fail in the end,
And thou be but their thrall and their bondsman, who wert born for their very friend:
For few things from the Gods are hidden, and the hearts of men they know.
And how that none rejoiceth to quaü and crouch alow 
I saw the body of Wisdom, and of shifting guise was she wrought, And I stretched out my hand to hold her, and a mote of the dust
they caught; . And I prayed her to come for my teaching, and she came in the midnight
dream —
And I woke and might not remember "
If, judged by a modern mind, Brynhild's wisdom appears improved here, the same thing may be said of her morals. Morris's sources teil of a daughter, Aslaug, whom she bore to Sigurd before her marriage with Gunnar. Morris has no use for this daughter, who for the rest plays no part what* ever in the original story, and he is as careful of Brynhild's prenuptial virginity as the writer of the German Nibelun* genlied. In his poem her prophetic powers, too, show to greater advantage than here, where everything is so hard and exact as to leave the reader unmoved, unless, indeed, he should feel inclined to smile:
'This I dreamed,' said Gudrun, 'that we went, a many of us in company, from the bower, and we saw an exceeding great hart, that far excelled all other deer ever seen, and the hair of him was golden; and this deer we were all fain to take, but I alone got him; and he seemed to me better than all things else; but sithence thou, Brynhild, didst shoot and slay my deer even at my very knees, and such grief was that to me that scarce might I bear it; and then afterwards thou gavest me a wolf*cub, which besprinkled me with the blood of my brethren.'
Brynhild answers, 'I will arede thy dream, even as things shall come to pass hereafter; for Sigurd shall come to thee, even he whom I have chosen for my well*beloved; and Grim* hild shall give him mead mingled with hurtful things, which



shall cast us all into mighty strife. Him shalt thou have, and him shalt thou quickly miss; and Atli the king shalt thou wed; and thy brethren shalt thou lose, and slay Atli withal in the end.' (op. cit. p. 89)
A threat to be effective should be veiled and vague; and prophetic utterances to impress us should sound aloof and oracular. Morris's Gudrun speaks to Brynhild the wise woman as follows:
I slept, and again as aforetime were the gates of the dreamhall moved, And I went in the land of shadows; and lo I was crowned as a queen, And I sat in the summ r*season amidst my garden green; And there came a hart from the forest, and in noble wise he went, And bold he was to look on, and of fashion excellent Before all beasts of the wild-wood; and fair gleamed that glorious-one, And upreared his shining antlers against the very sun. So he came unto me and I loved him, and his head lay kind on my knees. And fair methought the summer, and a time of utter peace. Then darkened all the heavens and dreary grew the tide, And medreamed that a queen I knew not was sitting by my side, And from out of the din and the darkness, a hand and an arm there came, And a golden sleeve was upon it, and red rings of the Queenfolk's fame: And the hand was the hand of a woman: and there came a sword and a thrust
And the blood of the lovely wood»deer went wide about the dust Then I cried aloud m my sorrow, and lo, in the wood I was, And all around and about me did the kin of the wildWolvcs pass. And I called them friends and kindred , and upreared a battle»brand. And cried out in a tongue that I knew not, and red and wet was my hand.
'A queen I knew not' has replaced 'thou, Brynhild', the sword*thrust is dealt by the hand of an unknown woman, and the sanguinary wolf*cub has given place to a pack of wolves led by sword*wielding Gudrun herself. The poetical gain is evident, here and in Brynhild's interpretations:
'Thou shalt wed a King and be merry, and then shall come the sword, And the edges of hate shall be whetted and shall slay thy love and thy lord, And dead on thy breast shall he fall: and where then is the measureless moan? Frcm the first to the last shalt thou have him, and scarce shall he die alone. Rejoice, o daugther of Giuki! there is worse in the world than this.
Is it strange, O child of the Niblungs, that thy glory and thy pain
Must be blent with the battle's darkness and the unseen hurrying bane?
But hearts with thine heart shall be tangled: but the queen and the
hand thou shalt know, When w- twain are wise together; thou shalt know of the sword
and the wood,



Thou shalt know of the wild-wolves* howling and thy right hand wet with blood,
When the day of the smith is ended, and the stithy's fire dies out,
And the work of the master of mastera through the feast-hall goeth about'
This, surely, differs from the other thing as an Old^Testa* ment prophet from a Gypsy fortune*teller. And now that the Bible has been ref erred to in this connection, we may observe that Biblical echoes are as numerous in the poem as might have been expected. To a Victorian Englishman sublimity was inextricably bound up with the English Bible, and not only did Morris's Biblical cadences and allusions come 'of themselves,' unbidden, but they came naked and unashamed; as where Sigurd, the renowned companion of the Niblung Kings, is represented as laughing to scorn 'the treasure where thieves break through and steal, and the moth and the rust are corrupting' (op. cit. p. 181).
We may even go further, and point out that in recreating Sigurd Morris relegated his hero's Berserker uncle Sinfiotli and his hardly less terrible father Sigmund to a very remote past indeed; that he virtually made Sigurd a Christian hero and own brother to Wordsworth's Happy Warrior,
the generous Spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought: Whose high endeavours are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright 
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train! Turns his necessity to glorious gain 
Morris's Sigurd seems to other people
.... so steadfast and so great That the sea of chance wide«weltering 'neath his will must needs abate.
He is Alfred the Great, William the Silent, and Simon Bolivar in one. Listen how he is hailed by the Niblung maidens on returning from a campaign:
Yea, they sing the song of Sigurd and the face without a foe,
And they sing of the prison's rending and the tyrant laid alow,
And the golden thieves' abatement, and the stilling of the churl,
And the mocking of the dastard where the chasing edges whirl;
And they sing of the outland maidens that thronged round Sigurd's hand,
And sung in the streets of the foemen of the war»delivered land;



And they teil how the ships of the merchants come free and go at their will. And how wives in peace and safety may erop the vine-clad hill; How the maiden sits in her bower, and the weaver sings at his loom, And forget the kings of grasping and the greedy days of gloom; For by sea and hill and township hath the Son of Sigmund been. And looked on the folk unheeded....
And again, if Wordsworth's Happy Warrior is the man
Who, if he rise to station of command Rises by open means; and there will stand On honourable terms, or else retire....
we must again exclaim: 'Here is Sigurd!' when recollecting
the way in which the slayer of Fafnir introducés himself to
the Niblungs, after riding, smiling and unhindered,
....in under the gate that was long and dark as a cave
Bored out in the isles of the northland by the beat of the restless wave.
And the noise of the wind was within it, and the sound of swords unseen,
and after challenging the inmates:
'Ho, men of this mighty burg, to what folk of the world am I come? And who is the King of battles who dwells in this lordly home? Or perchance are ye of the Elfskin? are ye guest>fain, kind at the board, Or murderashurls and destroyers....?'
By the side of a passage like this, Morris's 'original' appears very unoriginal and c/iché4ike:
'he was by far above other men in courtesy and
goodly manners, and weh%nigh in all things else; and whenas folk teil of the mightiest champions, and the noblest chiefs, then ever is he named the foremost, and his name goes wide about on all tongues north of the sea of the Greekslands, and even so shall it be while the world endures '
Surely there is no tracé here of any Old Norse, nay, of any really epic, sentiment. This is pure Malory. But we shall in vain look in all Malory for a description to match this of the splendid pair Gudrun and Sigurd, after the latter has drunk the fateful cup that Grimhild had mixed him:
And all doubt in love is swallowed, and lovelier now is she
Than a picture deftly painted by the craftsmen over sea;
And her face is a rose of the morning by the nighfetidc framed about,
And the long*stored love of her bosom from her eyes is leaping out.
But how fair is Sigurd the King that beside her beauty goesl
How lovely is he shapen, how great his stature shows!
How kind is the clasping right-hand, that has smitten the battle acold!
How kind are the awful eyen that no foeman durst behold!
How sweet are the lips unsmiling, and the brow as the open day!
What man can behold and believe it that his life shall pass away?



This ideal vision — personal and Victorian at the same time — is Morris's own; and the warning tone that he can* not help sounding at the end is one of those seemingly insig* nificant touches that, pointing from a bright present to a vaguely disastrous future, make for unity where, in spite of crcumstantial presages, the mere chronicling found in the original presents us with no unity at all. And thus the poetical process of closer narrative knitting, more colourful presentation of occurrences as well as objects, and 'psychol* ogical deepening' in accordance with the poet's Victorian mentality, goes on, and it is as needless as it is tempting to point out more instances. Everything is raised to a higher plane, everything is made to assume grander proportions. In Hamilton Thompson's words (Cambr. Hist. of E.L. XIII p. 126) 'we are carried away upon the tide of Sigurd's heroic youth. The episodes follow one another with unfailing vigour and ireshness, and, in the climax of the story, the slaying of the Niblung kings in the hall of Atli, the death*song of Gunnar among the serpents and the vengeance and death of Gudrun, Morris pursued his theme triumphantly to the end.' He never theorized in print about narrative art in general or epic in particular. His aesthetic preoccupation was restricted to the field of architectural, pictorial or decorative art, and ignored poetry. But he was a great 'Sagaman', and in the practice of his magnum opus we constantly find him verifying Lascelles Abercrombie's words: 'The epic poet col* laborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work' ('The Epic' p. 71). Morris was an epic poet, not a scientific investigator of Old Norse sentiment. And though he could no more make bricks without straw than any other builder; though he did not invent his raw material, he was not an archaeological re*creator; he was a creator.
In the case of 'Sigurd' Morris's countrymen were slow to recognise this, and it was only very gradually that the poem found its way to the reading public. It is true it was well received by such critics as Saintsbury and Andrew Lang, but it was not a success. It took ten years to sell 2500 copies, and this failure to catch the public's ears might, of course, be held to prove the poet's sturdy independence of mind and character, which prevented him from 'writing down' to the level of his prospective readers. But the matter is not quite so simple. Any one setting out to teil a story must be



conscious of an imaginary audience he is going to address. But why should he want to teil this story? Because he feels the need to communicate to others such things as have interested him and should therefore interest his audience. Morris had been so hugely interested in his 'Volsungs and Niblungs' as to present the British public with two versions of the grand Teutonic tale. What if the first of them had not succeeded in commending itself to wide circles of read= ers? There were extenuating circumstances to be found in the remotenes of the story and its 'entanglement of strange manners'. But that the public did not immediately respond, with shouts and rejoicing, to the swing and the amplitude of the second, was something the poet could never have foreseen. Had he failed to do justice to his glorious matter? His heart assured him he had not, and the critics that had understanding did the same. Vague he had been occasion» ally, even slipshod in places, — but in the field of poetry it is only short lyrics that can come within measurable distance of perfection. In any work planned and executed to a large scale there are bound to be blemishes. **) It is common knowledge that Homer himself is not always wide awake, and that even the sun has spots.
Was there anything repellent in Morris's manner?
His verse — which has been charged with clumsy vehe* mence by Lascelles Abercrombie (op. cit. p. 41) — was a new departure in English, and what is novel may repel as well as attract, especially when, as is too often the case, it is not quite impeccable. Clutton*Brock (op. cit. p. 130) — who errs in identifying it with what he calls the 'Saturnian' metre of 'The Queen was in her parlour eating bread and honey' — acknowledges that 'it has a wider range than any other English metre that has been applied to epic', but pronounces it, unlike the Greek hexameter, unsuited to 'passages of noble calm or to matter*of*fact statement'. Saintsbury, how* ever, — who errs in tracing a connection between it and the metre of the Tale of Gamelyn — considers it a 'really splendid metre for narrative purposes' (Cambr. H. of E. L. XIII p. 252). And whoever should think this an exaggerated
M) Compare what Morris says about Gripir, his Akinetos (Bk II p. 110): .... all his desire was dead, and he lived as a God shall live, Whom the prayers of the world hath forgotten (our italics).



view will at any rate find it easy to be in substantial agree* ment with Hamilton Thompson (ibid. p. 126), according to whom it is an anapaestic couplet of Morris's own invention, with six beats to each line, and — though somewhat inferior to the Homeric hexameter — 'thoroughly adequate' to the occasion which called it forth. A passage like the following, of unimpeachable serenity, is enough to refute Cluttön* Brock's reservation:
So the hall'dusk deepens upon them till the candles come arow, And they drink the wine of departing and gird themselves to go; And they dight the dark'blue raiment and climb to the wains aloft While the horned moon hangs in the heaven and the summer wind blows soft.
fhen the yoke-beasts strained at the collar, and the dust in the moon arose,
And they brushed the side of the acre and the blooming dewy close; Till at last, when the moon was sinking and the night was waxen late, The warders of the earMolk looked forth from the Niblung gate, And saw the gold pale»gleaming, and heard the wain*wheels crush The weary dust of the summer amidst the midnight hush.
(Bk II. pp. 157/8).
So much for Morris's verse. Next, as regards his language, we may observe at once that, while containing a certain number of archaisms, it is not excessively archaic. Forms like 'thou' and 'leadeth' hardly invite any comment in an epic dealing with remote events, and there are passages upon passages, and most effective and poetical ones, with no archaisms at all:
Then all sank into silence, and the Son of Sigmund stood
On the torn and furrowed desert by the pool of Fafnir's blood,
And the Serpent lay before him, dead, chilly, dull, and grey;
And over the Glittering Heath fair shone the sun and the day,
And a light wind followed the sun and breathed o'er the fateful place,
As fresh as it furrows the sea»plain or bows the acres' face.
(Bk. II p. 126).
The numerous Biblical turns and cadences already referred to should, if anything, have helped to ingratiate 'Sigurd' with the reading public, and there cannot have been any* thing very repellent in the far less numerous kennings, mostly translations of Old Teutonic word»coinings by skalds who were unwilling to call a spade a spade. Appellations like swambath for 'sea', warrflame for 'sword', shieldsgarth for 'fighting body', rain of Odin for 'shower of arrows', iiles



of Odin for 'shields', impart a distinct flavour to the poem, a flavour of which Morris must have been very glad to' avail himself, seeing the kenning*like names he bestows upon the snakes that are charmed by Gunnar's harping as he sits, 'bare of his kingly weed', in Atli's 'worm*close':
Still hot was that close with the sun, and thronged with the coiline folk And about the feet of Gunnar their hissing mouths awokeBut he heeded them not nor beheld them, and his hands in the ham* strmgs ran, v And he sat him down in the midmost on a sun*scorched rock and wan ihen uprose the Song of Gunnar, and sang o'er his crafty hands.
And the crests of the worms have fallen. and their fllckTring- tonguel are still, s
The Roller and the Coiler, and Greyback, lord of ill Grave-groper and Death.swaddler, the Slumberer of the Heath Oold*wallower, Venom.smiter, lie still, forgetting death And loose are the coils of Long.back; yea, all as soft are laid
016 kine m midmost summer about the elmy glade 
(Bk. IV. p. 336).
As 'Nordic' feeling, predominant in Morris, was by no means an alien thing to his English contemporaries, most of whom had been influenced, not, indeed, by Count Gobi* neau but by writers like Carlyle, Froude,26) Freeman Kmgsley, and others, the only cause that for a relatively long time could delay the ultimate success of this stirring poem, this undoubted epic, appears to have been the great vogue of Tennyson's Idylls. The bulk of the poetry4oving public found it impossible to worship at two shrines
§ 3. Charles Doughty's huge poem 'The Dawn in Britain' which was brought out in 1906, and has never been reprinted yf^enerally referred to as an epic. W. H. Hudson (p. 97 of The Lands End') calls it a noble epic. It certainly is an ambitious attempt, its six volumes making an imposing show on any bookshelf But it is not an epic in the sense that Uiad, Beowulf, and Sigurd the Volsung are epics. It rather invites comparison with Firdausi's Shéhnóma, not as regards its style, but its structure.
A mere dip into, just a first acquaintance with, the book, might easily lead a superficial reader — if he had not been 'P^onipare: 'it seems as if Teutonic tradition, Teutonic feeling
fin a cri iaTe fn^t* ** ^L**** °» English and German pS Un a cntique on Arnold's poems, Westminster Review, 1854).



immediately repelled by its exceedingly forbidding style — to deny Doughty all sense of structure. This impression would be wrong, though. True, his celebrated prose=book 'Arabia Deserta' is discontinuous enough, a mere note=book 'written up', only held together by the personality of its author. Whereas the narrative artist must needs be choosing and excluding, arranging and manipulating his material, Doughty had not learned to do any of these things when he settled down to the writing of 'The Dawn in Britain'. His purpose in 'Arabia Deserta' having been to include anything he held valuable, this catholic inclusiveness had, from being a practice, become a habit with him, and he never shook this habit off. In fact his didacticism was always in danger of becoming didacticüis.
Among the minor symptoms of this disease is Doughty's fondness for notes of the archaeological, geographicaLmytho* logical and philological kind. 'Lutece' is duly explained as Paris. The verb to yammer having been used in the text, the corresponding 'Anglo*Saxon' form is supplied in a footnote. The goddess Nerthus having been referred to, forthwith a footnote identifies her with her Scandinavian counterpart. As a rule this explanatory or informative matter is accurate enough. Doughty was a learned man. He had taken a science degree at Cambridge. He had for some time studied lm* guistics at Leyden University. 'Arabia Deserta', too, must have been to its author a kind of liberal education. But many a reader who thinks he knows something of Teutonic mythology will rub his eyes on being informed by our poet that Woden, whom we always picture to ourselves as a horseman, drives a chariot drawn by wolves (Vol. I, p. 61, note). Other readers will wonder why Doughty should on one page make use of Latin vocatives (Book XVII, Vol. V p. 42: Fulve, Favoni Aper), and forget to do so on the next (ibid. p. 43: Novicius), or if history in blank verse is the same as epic:
Claudius himself, then, in his state, uprisen,
Before that valorous young man, knight of Rome!
(Soldiers' most coveted meed,) on him, the chapelet,
Whereon inscribed, Ob Civem Servatum!
Imposed, for Roman citizen's life preserved.
(ibid. p. 43).
Instead, of loading every rift in his tale with poetic ore,



as Keats advised, Doughty loads it with bits of information and items of knowledge, and we are not astonished that ™.«.mc Jhould m six v°himes or about 1400 pages. If Wilham Morris had followed the same method in 'Sigurd' the result might have been something simüar and equally appallmg. But Morris's artistic instincts preserved him from ralhng into such a trap. Morris was a poet, Doufihtv a poetical*minded scientist.
Even thedesign of «The Dawn in Britain' may be termed scientihc. There is no unravelling here of a fateful knot with a human appeal. Many a reader who has struggled through the labyrmthine windings of this interminable poem will even doubt whether there is any design in it at all. But there is. In the words of a whole*hearted admirer of the poem Professor Barker Fairley of Toronto University, (op. cit p. yjj the poem is grandly planned.... But.. the first impression is not one of orderliness; the structure does not leap to the eye, as it does in a smooth narrative. In this vast poem, nature with her chaos has overflowed, and blurred the hnes and buried the foundations deep, so that m a single unassisted reading it is not easy to detect them lt is necessary to read again and watch till one by one the' lines emerge and group themselves, and the details take their place.... (p 95) The 'dawn' in Britain is the dawn of «vdization and chiefly of Christianity.... It is a tale of Bntons, Gauls, Teutons, Romans, Greeks, Jews, and Phoeni, cians^... [setting] the mind travelling somewhere between
Srt^° SII;afS.-°f Brltain' the 'Utmost IsIe °f the whole earth, and Palesfane, where the dawn of the poem springs Rome and the Mediterranean Iie between. In order to do iZ Z KeSïrentS' Doughty had to sPan ^ period of wJ* u - ?6 dïi*0t- See a simpIe movement from East to West, brmging Christianity and Roman discipline to Britain He saw a larger tidal movement of history, which first flowed from West to East and then returned strengthened in volume and purpose, from East to West. He begins, there* tore, with the mvasion of Rome and Delphi by the Gauls and Proceeds then to the invasion of Britain by Rome and by Christianity.' -
n TJ".r-y.au.imp?rsing task' and one for which Doughty dulv qualified himself by assiduous study. It would ?equire a good* sized volume by itself to tracé all his sources, but



fortunately our purpose does not require this labour which would be a weariness to the reader's flesh. It is enough to say that he read up all the documents he could lay hold of, whether historical, archaeological or geographical, and when Caesar, Polybius, Tacitus and their peers failed him, he resorted to Geoffrey of Monmouth or to the 'Gospel of Nicodemus', and when no help was to be derived from those quarters he had recourse to his own imagination.
If he had read up less and drawn more freely on this same imagination, which was of no mean order; if he had been less of a coaster, and more of an adventurer in love with the main; it is exceedingly likely that he would have produced a more satisfactory poem and even a genuine epic. We will adduce in proof only one long passage, the madness of King Caradoc (Caractacus) after being defeated by the Roman tribune Aulus. Tacitus and Dio Cassius had fur* nished Doughty with the historical material concerning this prince, but the powerful description of this delirium is all his own. He introducés it, after the reported death of Thorolf the Saxon, who was to have come to Caradoc's assistance (Book XIX; Vol. V pp. 147*158):
Descended, from high settle, Caradoc,
Nor salutes any; and to high night, went forth.
In Caradoc's hand, gleams Marvor, that lean blade; Which, in old days of Brennus, vanquished Rome. The warlord treads forth, on white Winter-mould, Of snow: and Caradoc still afflicts himself; Nor ceases, with his deadly heart, commune. Him-seems, in every bush, meet ThorolFs ghost!
Had entered Caradoc path, to Embla's house; But travailing much, in busy troubled thought; At parting of two ways, oblivious; So clouds of sorrow cumber and oppress His sense, the sire miswent; or demons, else, Misled, of ground or wood. Was mid of night; When looked he, see now his own lighted porch, Under hill side; behold is the corpse-field! Where, men of Caerwent, fallen, in war with Rome, Lie in grave-mould: this place is known to him.
He is alone, with Death, in this dark wood; And, with a frozen heart, that homicide hand Of Caradoc feels, among the mounded dead, The mouth adown, of lean devouring blade; Whereon, fame is, had perished Second Brennus!



Less dread, him-thinks, that griesly face of death, Than this disease of life. ..
Soughs the night-wind; and smite with dreary sound
The forest boughs together His soul longs thither, where,
He might, with wolves, howl, bell with the grave-owl; And bellow forth the woodness of his soul! Nor come unto men's living ears, his voice.
And, is it the wild hunt, in skies, he hears? Furious night-host; wherein feil Morrigu rides. And her swart hags, with hounds of fiery breath. The Guledig's cry, him-seems, that fares in clouds, And Antethrigus' shout, which rings above! That headless hunter drives, in heaven's wide heath.
It is, in the night woods, wolves' murderous voice; Which glutted, ere, in slaughter-fields, their gulfs; Wherein feil flower, of Britons' comely youth: But deerns them Caradoc, in his wildered mood, Romans, werewolves, and their wolf-suckled kingsl Through glade, with gait of giant, the hero fares. Would, mongst these wind-cast beams, his strong fierce hands Their crude abhorred hearts, rent up, by the rootsl
Issued, like lamp, from wild wood of the skies, Now moon outshines; and cast great forest sterns, Whose crooked boughs rock on this frozen wind, Swart shadows; and weep oft their snowy crests, Down on sheen huiver thicket boughs, beneath. Caradoc them deerns, who now, night-dreamer walks, With darkened mood, shafts, harnessed Roman soldiere; And wind-gusts, piping loud, blow like an horn!
Like ureox, then, he rushed; and rang dark forest, With battle-shout of great Caratacus! With that Rome-quelling brand, which ere of Brennus, He slays, (alas, for ruth!) the rinded trees. Romans him-thought those stedfast timber-ranks; Him-seemed his hands smote tribunes and centurions.
Last stumbling Caradoc forth, on some gnarled root;
Wallowed in snow, the warsire slumbere fast Rest hero, sleep, under these starry gods!
Like to some swart vast fowl, how silent Night, (As Day she covered, with her dusky wings,) Broods o'er dim sullen round, of earth and woods! It night of the moon-measurer of the year, Is, wherein Belisama, eyebright goddess, Girded in kirtle blue, with woodwives sheen, Wont to fare forth; and her shield-maidens' train, And loud hounds in the forest-skies above.
She, Caradoc seeing, stays her aery wain: And, marvelling! in cloud-cliff, her divine team Sbe bound: so lights this faery queen, benign.



(Like her sire Belin,) to the kin of men.
She goddess, leaning on her spear-staff, wakes
In this his loneness, in cold midnight grove,
Over the hero's sleep: and, in herself,
Quoth; what is blind, brief, discourse of man's life,
But as a spark, out of eternal Night;
That shines as gledeworm, in the world, a moment:
Or glairy path of snail, which in the sun,
Glisters an hour; the next, of dew or rain,
Is molten. Like to hart, of a great horn
Fallen in some hunter's pit, lies here King Caradoc,
Man best beloved, mongst Britons, of all gods!
Yet is, of mortal wights, an old said saw;
Is worth no weal, who may no woe endure.
Sith, with her shield-brim, she traced round him, sleeping, A circuit; wherein enter, him to hurt, Might sprite, nor wight, nor beast, nor element!
In his dead slumber, dreams the glory of Britain, He sees Heli's brazen kingdom open wide. Land of the sunless dead, derne plain beneath, Full all of dread inextricable paths; Whero'er, for light of day, hangs fiery mist There journey trains of spirits, whose cold graved joints Lapped some in clay; some lie in foundered ships, Other cast under thorny brakes and moss; With creeping things, which suffer cold and wet: He sees then glorious Thorolf go to land!
But day-star risen, passed Belisama forth. Then cometh soon up the tardy sun, above These Winter woods, like targe oi glistering brass; And grows glad morning Hght, from part to part Like to a pair of scales, thus chant pale druids, In giant palm of world-sustaining god, Is Day and Night. What hour Day riseth forth, Descends the baleful Night behind his back.
Last stirs the sire, lo, stretcheth, in his sleep; For thrills the royal ear, ripe merry note, Of throstle-cock, that pipes from thicket bushl Like jolly plough-swain, fluting in his fist; Or who a-Maying goes by the green forest
He wakes, upon his elbow then upleans; And looketh him, lo, about like one distraught! Then heavy rose the king Caratacus; And in that seemed some staggering miller, pale; On whose courbe shoulder, weight is wont be laid, Of hi» lord's grist, and who is old; so hath The warlord dredged night's hoary powdered frost
And yet is darkness, in the royal breast; When, lifted up his eyes, he new light sees! Shrink now clear stars; and come, the sacred Dawn Is crownéd queen, in wide watch-hill of heaven.



Behold new day, unfolding, like a budl Sweef voice of early birds, sounds in the wood. This snowy bosom of the mould, like mead, In Spring-time, is, of gowans, blushing red; Kindled, yond hills shine, as some Summer heathl Whence sun, like eagle, soars, on wings of gold; Shedding new gladsome ray, on dead night-world.
Sprang, in that moment, mighty gentle hound, With a deep throat, and licked the royal feet! He bays, that rings again the Winter-forest And Caradoc knows the wolf-hound of the queen 
It is scarcely to be expected that one single quotation, lengthy though it may be thought, can do anything like justice to a poet who must be represented by a huge frag* ment of the gigantic canvas covered by his brush, or not at all. He does not deal in easily quotable 'jewels five words long', and it would mislead the reader to give any of his numerous gold 'nuggets' apart from the rocky deposits in which we find them embedded. But if the passage quoted should fail to commend itself we may confidently assert that no other passage will. For what little music it may contain we need not stop to thank Doughty; striving after such things was beneath him. If they came of themselves, unsought, well and good. But words must take care of them* selves. Doughty never takes the trouble to remove a mean* ingless assonance or rime. He does not expect us to notice such trifles, neither does he look for credit where he happens to please ears made exacting by a host of English poets, from Doughty's own favöurite Spenser downwards. What he is pleased to put before his readers in the guise of blank verse is often as execrable as any doggerei can be, and he constantly ignores the subtle way in which words placed in close proximity take colour from each other, as the minute dabs of paint do in the pictures of a pointillisie. Years ago an American poet, Sidney Lanier, described a greater man than himself, Walt Whitman, as 'poetry's butcher — huge raw collops slashed from the rump of poetry, and never mind gristle' ('The Poems of Sidney Lanier' XXXVIII); if he lived now he would call Doughty poetry's bricklayer, using words as if they were as many bricks, with commas for mortar. Or perhaps a comparison to the 'cyclopean' builders of Mycenae would describe him best. At any rate, the fol* lowing fragment will give an idea of Doughty at his ever* recurrent worst:



Senotigern, old royal Druid,
Revealed his people's will, at length, to Sarton; And namely, that should wed the royal maids 
Answered the pious king, touching this thing, He would enquire, of heaven, by sacrifice; More favourable he had oftoime, found, his gods By night-time. For his people, whose infinite voice, I hear, slay, druid, a white buil; and slay Me, (see thou), a perfect wether for my soul: And for each of my children, an ewe lamb. So might my prayer receive thrice»holy gods. That druid went forth 
Now day, an herald, from moot-hill, proclaims, Sarron the King, admonished of high gods, The people's asking grants. Stand forth who covet. Of noble youth, be sons in Samoth's house. Three score, lo, wooers, of those royal maids, Excelling all their fellows, in mtn's sight, Of hew full pale, (so love drinks up their spirits!) Rise: and seen now they all were to be sons. Of whoso noblest are of o'erfared Gauls. Bundies Senotigern then, of little rods, Prepares; whereon each wooer his several token, Sets: and these being all together cast, In priest's white saie; behold that reverend druid, Calls two purblind old wights, out of the press. As these then wave and shake, their lots fall forth..
(Book I. Vol. I, pp. 12—14.)
Barker Fairley has made an ingenious, but to our opinion totally unconvincing, attempt to vindicate this kind of Eng* lish. 'Doughty was under the severe necessity of forging a style which would create and sustain the impression of a life ante*dating the English traditions we know and which would also lead over into those traditions and voice them directly. He had to depart from tradition, yet do nothing that would block his return to it' (op. cit p. 141). If this were anything but a fallacy, a book attempting to deal with, say, the Magyar spirit, — whatever that may be — would have to be written in an imitation of Hungarian syntax. And whether a return to ordinary English were open to Doughty or not, the fact remains that he never availed himself of it. His poetic style remained unchanged to the end, and not only to the end of 'The Dawn in Britain', but also in poems which were written long afterwards, poems dealing with modern life, such as 'The Clouds' with its airships.
Of course Doughty imagined that his 'poetic' style suited his purpose as well as it suited his personality. But the key



to his style, just as in the case of all writers, — whether their names are Johnson or Carlyle, Macaulay or Trollope, — is furnished by personality only. 'Alien amidst an alien race' he must have feit for the greater part of his existence, not only when, in constant danger of his life, he wandered among the Beduins, not only when he was writing up his notes in British India, but afterwards just as well, when, having returned to England, he settled down to a secluded life of study. The England that he wrote for, the England that had his heart, was not actual England, with her week* ends and gossip and divorce-courts; it was the ideal country with its ideal institutions, which he had pictured in glowing colours to the incredulous Beduins as they sat chatting over their coffee*cups (cf. 'Arabia Deserta' I p. 297). The speech of those degenerated moderns was not his speech; but although his, no doubt, was better, he sadly acknowledged to himself that it was not good enough. Had not Max Müller and the whole host of romantic linguists — Leyden Cosijn included — taught that virtually allEuropeanlanguag* es have deteriorated from their glorious pristine condition? But he would save from the wreek whatever he could! And so he began to archaize, sometimes even adopting Batavisms, e.g. 'The lord liked of the waggoner's bold speech' ('Dawn' Bk IX p. 46); 'she smells to her young, rises and stands upon her feet to hek it over' ('Ar. Des.' I p. 324); 'and that cursed people's trade is fabled to be all in landloping' (ibid. p. 129); 'the ruinous house was of a miserable old man' ('Ar. Des.' II p. 347); 'they gather cockles, longs the strand' ('Dawn' Bk IX p. 6 Vol. III); [he] 'went forth view, what this were for a shore' (ibid. p. 17). Such things, however, were far less important than a habit he must have acquired during his long sojourn abroad, especially among the illiterate Beduins, — speaking all the while a language in which he could not let himself go — the habit of handling, in his thought and speech, words, or at best word»groups, rather than sentences. And this habit could not but be reinforced by reading and mentally translating Latin texts. Indeed, many of his pas* sages make the impression of — somewhat schoolboyishly faithful — translations from Latin. Of course, Latinisms like the use of 'only' in 'Whose only arm a nation's shelter was', ('Dawn' Bk XX; p. 249 vol. V), or 'cause was the only avarice of cursed Catus' (op. cit. Bk XXII, p. 62 vol. VI), are glaring.



So is 'fame is' (op. cit. Bk VI, p. 61 vol. II); so is more. Doughty *s avowed indebtedness to Edmünd Spenser (Cf. his prose epilogue 'Post lila' to vol. VI) may be said to come to this: that no more than his revered master — who, accord* ing to Ben Jonson, wrote 'no language' — did he write English. He wrote Doughtyese.
And — apart from wight and sith and dight and fere and founden &c. &c. — the number of Spenserian echoes to be heard in his work is curiously small. True, there arethewell* known 'sea*shouldering whales' ('Dawn', Bk VII, p. 172 vol. II); true, there are certain personifications in Spenser's vein: yellow Pestilence and pale Flight, and mad Discord, 'drunken of the cup, of mixture of men's blood and heaven's wrath', and Household Strife,
'immane worm, of hellish countenance. Bit of whose tceth is an aye«rankling sore; And blasts fair world, so wide, her carrion breath; Wrcak, madness, pangs of heil, are in her voice! And hiss her tongues, of rancorous feil despite, From mom till eve ' (ibid. pp. 138, 139).
But Spenser's rhythmical flow is beyond Doughty; he deals in hardly anything but staccatos. And we have plenty of reminiscences from others: from Hor ace, from Shake* speare, from Byron, from Tennyson. Compare:
'To Mendip hills, returns the Roman knight 
Yet cannot Auleius from himself remove.'
(op. cit. Vol. VI, p. 103),
with Carminum Lib. II (XVI, 19, 20):
Patriae quis exsul Se quoque fugit?
Compare:
'Through launds, and by sweefc=smelling underwoods, Which guirlanded with honeysuckle locks; Where windflower blows, and dew»dropt daffodillies, With robin, medléd in the thicket grass'
(op. cit. Vol. II, p. 76),
with the well*known passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act II, Sc. I, 11. 249—252):
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows; Quite over*canopied with lush woodbine, With sweet musk*roses, and with eglantine 



Compare:
'Grey deep, how wholesome, to a shipman's eyel And who is 'scaped, from ape-faced world, not joys Look forth, o'er thy vast wandering breast, abroad, From some lone cliff, and snuffmp thy salt breath? Eternal flood! how they waves' sullen sound, Doth seem, as mother's voice, to wakening child!'
(op. cit Vol. VI, p. 213),
with
To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and feil To slowly tracé the forest's shady scène....
('Childe Harold' Ct II. st 25),
in combination with
once I loved
Torn ocean's roar, but thy soft murmuring Sounds sweet as if a Sister's voice reproved, That I with stern delights should e'er have been so moved, ('Ch. Har.' Ct III, st. 85).
Compare:
'Like swan, which proudly breasts the tide, her yards Belayed and ruddersbands, Goldorm now sails
Forth, on night frith, where lightly blows the wind' 
('Dawn', Bk XIX. p. 143, Vol. V),
with the concluding lines of Tennyson's 'Morte d'Arthur':
the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like some full»breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs....
As these and similar instances might be multiplied, and since (as we have seen) rhythm or word*music (including rime) mean nothing to Doughty, his boasted disciple«ship to immortal Edmund — apart from the way in which he jumbles together heathen gods and demons with Christian saints and patriarchs — is reduced to little else than a fondness for archaisms that are often needless and for inversions that are as often as not uncouth to a degree.")
") One more illustration from Book XXII (Vol. VI, pp. 83, 84): Gauls, loudshooved squadrons, yelling, gainst them, ride, With levelled spearsl Contemn those, few hedge*folk; Are armed, with bats, whose most ignoble hands, And few with glaives.



And it will not do for Barker Fairley (op. cit. p. 233) to come with a plausible vindication of Doughty's declaration of poetic faith, by alleging that the affinity between the two poets 'was one of inner spirit and not of technique'. This exegesis of some very plain sentences that should be taken at their face value (Cf. especially 'Dawn' Vol. VI, p. 242. 'Yet even in his brief lifetime, English speech began some* what to decay') is too violent by far.
To account in some manner for Doughty's peculiarities of style and diction is not to justify them. We may grant that literary beauty is first of all a matter of thought and feeling, but in doing so we must accept the logical conclusion: that style and diction should not interfere with the trans* ference to the reader's mind of what was in the writer's, and that, if such transference is desired — and by whom is it desired if not by a teller of tales? — some preoccupation at least with the reader's mind, with the receptive mind, is necessary. The reader's attention should be economized, not worked to death, and inversions should be natural, not funambulatory. Barker Fairley's plea that Doughty's tale... 'compounded of the most popular elements in literature.... was executed in a style which can be read without initiation by the unsophisticated', and that 'it is most certain that the untrained reader was not absent from Doughty's mind as he wrote' (op. cit. p. 161) cannot possibly serve here. Nor, with Morris's 'Sigurd' on our writing*table, can we accept the contention that the 'power of epic narrative on a heroic scale' was lost, and that Doughty was better equipped for the task of recovering it than any other modern poet. (op. cit., p. 148).
There is yet another point on which we must join issue with Barker Fairley. According to him (op. cit. p. 124) the first five 'books' of 'The Dawn in Britain', the so*called Brennus books, with their vagueness, coldness, and aloof* ness, were purposely made 'shadowy, impersonal and soulless' by the poet, because they had to serve as a back* ground to the far more colourful rest of the work. They form, it is alleged, by themselves a long preliminary epic, which was indispensable for the main purpose, since it contrasts so strongly with the manifold character*drawing of the Caradoc books. Our rejoinder to this is: that an



eminently dynamic art like story*telling cannot imitate the methods of static arts like sculpture and painting without defeating its own object. The background of a painting is seen together with the rest of it. As we scrutinize the whole the more important features will detach themselves from what is flat and shadowy. A tale on the contrary receives its background simply from such parts as have been successively relegated to it by the march of events, no matter how clearly each of them has been told. As Sigurd's glory increases the memory of Sigmund pales; as we become more engrossed in the Niblung entanglement, we forget Fafnir and Regin. But to anticipate this obscuring process when telling the beginnings of a story is clearly absurd. The first requirement for a story*teller is the ability to capture and retain the attention of his audience by being vivid from start to finish.
§ 4. More 'epics' than the preceding three, of which — as we have seen — Morris's 'Sigurd' is truest to type, we do not propose to discuss. Inclusion in our survey might possibly have been found for Alfred Noyes's Drake, but for the consideration that this epic in blank verse, chiefly remarkable for its Miltonic echoes, does not invite much literary comment of the kind attempted here. But this chapter cannot well be concluded without a not too per» functory discussion of two long narrative poems, which, without being epics, would unhesitatingly be hailed as epic fragments if, instead of always having been easily access* ible in print, they were unearthed, in more or less damaged condition, from the ruins of some hermitage. We refer to 'Sohrab and Rustum' and 'Balder Dead' by Matthew Arnold.
They should be read, these two, by the light of Arnold's own theories, especially those unfolded in the Preface to 'Poems: A new Edition' (1853) and in his 'On Translating Homer' (1861) with its appendix: 'Last Words'. It is need* less to point out that in the case of a poet — even of an academie, theorizing poet like Matthew Arnold — theory, instead of taking precedence of practice, goes hand in hand with it, and develops and gets formulated as the poet, advancing from strength to strength, practises his art. Either will find support from the other, but both are the outcome of his personality.
Thanks to his upbringing, Arnold was saturated with the



ancients and, a willing pupil, had learned from them 'the three things which it is vitally important for the individual writer to know: — the allnmportance of the choice of a subject; the necessity of accurate construction; and the subordinate character of expression.' Commerce with the ancients appeared to Arnold 'to produce, in those who con* stantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon their judgement, not of literary works only, but of men and
events in general If they are endeavouring to practise
any art; they remember the plain and simple proceedings of the old artists, who attained their grand results by pene* trating themselves with some noble and significant action, not by inflating themselves with a belief in the pre*eminent importance and greatness of their own times. They do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their age, nor of the coming Poet; all this, they know, is the mere delirium of vanity; their business is not to praise their age, but to afford to the men who live in it the highest pleasure which they are capable of feeling. If asked to afford this by means of subjects drawn from the age itself, they ask what special fitness the present age has for supplying them: they are told that it is an era of progress, an age commissioned to carry out the great ideas of industrial development and social amelioration. They reply that with all this they can do nothing; that the elements they need for the exercise of their art are great actions, calculated powerfully and delightfully to affect what is permanent in the human soul; that so far as the present age can supply such actions, they will gladly make use of them; but that an age wanting in
moral grandeur can with difficulty supply such " (op.
cit. pp. 13—15).
It is clear that Arnold was unacquainted with the starting* point of our enquiry: Mill's denial that poetry has anything in common with story*telling. It is equally clear that if he had known about the theory he would have rejected it. We even find him, in the course of the same Preface, identifying poetry with imitated action, like the good Aristotelian that he was. It is one more proof of Mill's paper having been more of a portent than of an influence. Now as regards the three things regarded by Arnold as of vital importance, — of course, story*telling implies choosing a subject; of course, the discerning reader of a tale will demand adequate con*



struction, architectonic skill. But what of the third point raised?
What we find formulated here as 'the subordinate char* acter of expression' touches essentially the same problem as that of 'the grand style', always near to Arnold's heart. It was a quality which, he asserted, the Elizabethans, even Shakespeare, lacked or were deficiënt in, and in his treatise 'On Translating Homer' — Homer being the acknowledged master of 'the grand style' — he discusses the matter so searchingly as to make us wonder whether there is anything left to be said about it.
Arnold could not deny the grand manner to Milton, but the Miltonic style is 'laboured, self*retarding', because 'Mil* ton charges himself so full with thought, imagination, know*
ledge, that his style will hardly contain them Homer is
quite different; he says a thing, and says it to the end, and then begins another, while Milton is trying to press a thousand things into one. So that whereas, in reading Milton, you never lose the sense of laborious and condensed fulness, in reading Homer you never lose the sense of flowing and abounding ease'. We should 'be penetrated by a sense of four qualities' of this author (Essays L. & Cr. p. 215): 'that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plam and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and finally that he is
eminently noble ' Unlike Augustan English his language
is not literary and intellectualized. 'Homer always composes as Shakespeare composes at his best; Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shakespeare is often, Homer is never quaint and antiquated, as Shakespeare is sometimes.' (ibid. p. 231). Besides, he is inspired by his metre to use a 'loose and idiomatic grammar — a grammar which follows the essential rather than the formal logic of the thought' (ibid. p. 261).
But even in this way, Arnold thinks, he has not made himself sufficiently plain. 'The work of great masters is unique; and the Iliad has a great master's genuine stamp, and that stamp is the grand style' (ibid. p. 238), but no definition has yet been given by him. At last he hits upon the following: 'Alas! the grand style is the last matter in



the world for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith: 'One must feel it in order to know what it is'. But, as of faith, so too one may say of nobleness, of the grand style: 'Woe to those who know it not!' Yet this expression, though indefinable, has a charm; one is the better for considering it; bonum est, nos hic esse; nay, one loves to try to explain it, though one knows that one must speak imperfectly. For those then, who ask the question, what is the grand style? With sincerity, I will try to make some answer, inadequate as it must be. For
those who ask it mockingly I have no answer I think
it will be found that the grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or
with severity a serious subject The best model of the
grand style simple is Homer; perhaps the best model of the grand style severe is Milton.' ('Last Words', Essays Lit. & Cr., pp. 355—357).
Whether Arnold continued to hold the above principles (Cf. Saintsbury, Hist. of Cr. III p. 250) is a question which need not occupy us. It is enough for our purpose that he held them at the time when, with a Victorian mind holding 'classic' standards of taste, and having chosen his material respectively from ancient Persian legend and from Norse mythology, he composed first 'Sohrab and Rustum' and some years afterwards 'Balder Dead'.
By his choice of subjecfcmatter he proved that even a thorough*going partisan of the classics need not always go to the Greeks for 'worthy actions' to penetrate himself with. By calling 'Sohrab and Rustum' an episode he proved his literary insight. The story, in fact, as we find it in Firdausi's 'Shahnama' (Cf. Warner's translation in Trübner's Oriental series, Vol II pp. 118—187), was purely episodic; and Arnold did not derive his tale from Firdausi, but from a somewhat garbled account in Sir John Malcolm's 'History of Persia', (I p. 27 note), which he prefixed to his poem. We assume the story known, referring the reader who is interested in the motif and its affinities to van Gennep's discussion in his chapter on Le Combat du Père et du Fils in 'La Forma* tion des Légendes'. Balder's story, too, being common pro* perty by this time, we will not recount either; its meaning and implications have been exhaustively treated in Frazer's 'Golden Bough'.



If the stories themselves were not 'classic', neither was the metrical mould in which they were cast by the poet. Though Arnold, had pronounced himself in favour of naturalizing the hexameter — so long as it was not the hexameter of Evangeline — he left the attempt to others, using blank verse himself. Now every student of English literature knows that there is an endless variety of blank verse. But from Arnold's preoccupation with 'the grand style' it was to be expected that he would make an attempt to achieve something that should come as near as possible to his ideal of rapidity, directness, plainness of words and style, and nobleness of manner. Was he justified in making the at* tempt? There were poetical gifts in him; rapidity, simplicity and directness of speech were things that might be managed — after all, he did not lack the power of self*criticism. But what of the nobleness of manner, since it is only, by Ar* nold's own showing, a noble nature that can achieve that? Was there not too much of the wordling in him? Unlike Tennyson and Browning he was something of a swell, of a fop, as the merest glance at one of his photos — showing his immaculate costume, his side*whiskers, his monocle — will bear out. And he was conscious of his weakness; in fact he acknowledged it in his letters to his favourite sister, Jane. 'I am by nature so very different from you, theworldly element enters so much more largely into my composition,' he wrote to her in January, 1851 (Kingsmill, p. 87). How is worldliness to be reconciled with nobility of soul?
This is where the necessity he feit for 'worthy' subject* matter comes in. It is erroneous and unjust to say with Kingsmill (op. cit. p. 114) that Arnold required to be 'propped' by his subject. But the saying is nevertheless within an inch of hitting the mark. Arnold wanted to be penetrated by his subject to achieve forgetfulness of the world and its vanities, and to be truly himself. To him his subject*matter was not a prop, but a bath, purifying his soul. And let us observe first of all how, aiming at nobility, he discards all rhetoric. The intro ductory 'and' of the open* ing line of 'Sohrab and Rustum' merely serves to accentuate the episodic character of the story, and no opening could be simpler and at the same time as arresting. The test of a real story is the use of the preterite, and except in his dialogue and his similes Arnold uses the preterite through*
7



out. If we compare his practice with that of poets like Victor Hugo or Leconte de Lisle (Cf. especially the latter's Cuna* cépa in Poèmes Antiques, based on an episode in the Rama* yana as 'Sohrab and Rustum' on an episode in the Shah« nama), with their exaggerated, declamatory use of the histor* ical present and their static patches of description, we must award him the palm for pure narrative. His following in Homer's wake does him no harm. Besides, Homer must have had his predecessors too, and his debt to them can never be properly assessed.
And the first grey of morning filled the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream,
But all the Tartar camp along the stream
Was hushed, and still the men were plunged in sleep:
Sohrab alone, he slept not: all night long
He had lain wakeful, tossing on his bed;
But when the grey dawn stole into his tent
He róse, and clad himself, and girt his sword,
And took his horseman's cloak, and left his tent.
And went abroad into the cold wet fog,
Through the dim camp to Peran*Wisa's tent
Through the black Tartar tents he passed, which stood Clustering like bee*hives on the low flat strand Of Oxus 
There is no orgy here of preUminary stage*setting. What it is necessary that we should see is nearly all revealed to us through the eyes of one of the chief actors. The anóny* mous author of 'On the Sublime' (Cf. especially his XLII»d section) would have approved of it: no concision curtailing the sense, no frigid prolixities, but 'brevity which goes straight to the mark'. When, further on, Peran*Wisa's ac* coutrements are described, it is in Homer's way, in narrative form: He left
His bed, and the warm rugs whereon he lay, And o'er his chilly limbs his woollen coat He passed, and tied his sandals on his feet And threw a white cloak round him, and he took In his right hand a ruler's staff, no sword; And on his head he placed his sheepskin cap 
The catalogue of troops, too, is not without Homeric affinities:
The Tartars of the Oxus, the King's guard,
First with black sheepskin caps and with long spears;
Large men, large steeds; who from Bokhara come,



And Khiva, and ferment the milk of mares. Next the more temperate Toorkmuns of the south, The Tukas, and the lances of Salore 
And it was inevitable that a certain number of analogous situations, such as Glaucus versus Diomed in the Iliad (VI, 224—231), should present us with analogously worded dialogue. Dr. Johanna Gutteling, in her thesis on 'Hellenic Influence on the English Poetry of the Nineteenth Century', has traced a great number of parallel places, — and some more might be found. 'Thou knowest better words than this to say', spoken by Rustum to Gudurz, finds its counterpart in Iliad VII l 232; and the taunt that he levels at Sohrab who has dodged his blow, 'dancer', is a favourite invective with Alne&s as well as with Patroclus. (Cf. II. XVI11. 617 and 750). We need not look for more to be convinced that the poem under discussion is of the 'academie' kind. But there is no harm in academie art, so long as it does not attempt to make the imagination of the past do service for imagin* ation in the present.28) And surely T. S. Eliot hit the nail on the head when, in his study on Philip Massinger ('The Sacred Wood' p. 114), he wrote: Tmmature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least some* thing different. The good poet weids his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse
in interest '
Arnold was a good poet and his debt to Homer is avowed and unblushing. His imagination, warming with his subject, proved equal to the occasion all the time he was composing 'Sohrab and Rustum', and never produced anything finer than the impressive close of that poem. But though a good poet, he was not of the very great ones. It is hardly prob* able that, even if his career and his other activities had not prevented him, he could ever have written a real long epic. He was deficiënt in rhythmical impulse, or else this impulse was too intermittent. Apparently after writing
») Compare especially on this subject the chapter headed The Aca» demie Tradiüon in Geoffrey Scotfs The Architecture of Humanism'.



'Sohrab and Rustum' he had extracted out of blank verse all the rhythmical effects it would yield to him. In 'Balder Dead' — a fine poem as it goes — we find an endless succession of cadences familiar to us from its predecessor; it is full of echoes.
But when their souls were satisfied with wail, They went, and laid them down, and Nanna went Into an upper chamber, and lay down; And Frea sealed her tired lids with sleep.
We invite the reader to compare this with some lines already quoted on page 98: 'But when the grey dawn' etc. He will find a resemblance which might be termed phono* graphic. Instances of the same description might be multi* plied, but we refrain.
There is something else in Arnold's 'episode' that must be discussed, and that is his use of similes. The poem is full, perhaps too full, of them. Some are Homeric, but several others are as original as possible, e.g. the one about the rich woman eyeing, 'through her silken curtains'. the poor drudge who is making her fire. What is the character of these similes, and what their effect on the action?
Whatever we may think about their origin; whether we believe with Routh (op. cit. I, p. 26) that they were first employed to supplement an inadequate vocabulary; or whether it is better to hold with the present writer that their origin was merely exuberance of feelings finding vent in a special form; certain it is that in Homer and his imu tators the simile has become a genre of its own, a kind of poetical inset, serving to underline, so to say, or to throw into reliëf, an important stage of the action. Of the two elements which necessarily compose it, the weaker one contains the fundamental idea, whilst the stronger one serves for illustrative comparison. And though certain theo# rists maintain the advisability of placing the illustrative element second, Homer prefers the inverse order, causing thereby a temporary break in the narrative and rousing the curiosity of the auditor, who is all the more eager to watch what kind of expressed similitude will cause the interrupted flow of the narrative to resumé its bed.
As a rule this 'underlining' of the action consists primarily in a reinforcement, a heightening, of its sensuous aspect.



but.such reinforcement likewise heightens the 'feeling*tone' of the situation and its emotional contagiousness. Not in» frequently, howeyer, the visual or sensuous part of the underhning element has little in common with the situation itself, except the mere feeling»tone, so that we are compelled to infer that this was the aim of the author, who retards the action in order to give up both himself and his auditor or reader to some momentary rêverie. 'L'impression poétique se produit surtout dans les instants oü 1'action se ralentit, et laisse la pensée prendre 1'attitude contemplative'. (Sou» riau, Rêverie esthétique, pp. 90, 91).



CHAPTER VI.
Dieshards: Second Group. Novelists in Verse.
§ l. There is something puzzling in Mill's dictum about readers who 'fancy themselves lovers of poetry because they relish novels in verse' (M. 204). What literary productionS were in the philosopher's mind when he wrote this? Scott's verse*romances? Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming? Should we, merely by turning their verse into prose, get novels of the established type, easily recognisable as such, or could Mill have supposed we should?
It would have seemed rather more likely that he was thinking about a work like Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea,
if it were not for a passage like 'the novelist has to
describe outward things, not the inward man; actions and events, not feelings' (M. 205), surely an amazing statement for a countryman of Richardson, Goldsmith, Scott or Jane Austen to commit to paper, and if not positive proof of imperviousness to the literary qualities of the best novels he could have known, at any rate indicative of great care* lessness about facts when framing theories. In his celebrated study on 'Hermann und Dorothea' Wilhelm von Humboldt is at great pains to point out how Goethe, 'der gestaltende Dichter', relies, for the transference of his vision, on re* presentation and nothing but representation. But he is careful to insist that it is representation of both the outward and the inward man.29)
Even when expanded like this, however, Humboldt's state*
*•) Op. cit. p. 218. Auf Darstellung, auf Darstellung durch die Einbildungskraft, auf Darstellung des ganzen Menschen in seiner aussern Gestalt und seinem innern Wesen geht unser Dichter aus und diesen Zweck erreicht er in einem bewundernswürdigen Grade. Er ist nie bemüht, unsre Phantasie absichtlich weder zu ergötzen noch zu spannen noch überhaupt auf diese oder jene Weise zu bewegen; er hat ein wahres und eigentliches, ein grosses und unermessliches Geschaft, das alle seine Krafte, seine ganze Energie an sich reisst — die Menschheit und die Natur, die seinem künstlerischen Bliek einmal nicht anders als durchaus dichterisch geformt erscheint, auch uns wieder in derselben gestalt zu zeigen.
Dadurch weckt er zuerst und hauptsachlich unsern bildenden Sinn....



ment is incomplete, since it omits to settle the relation between narrative and verse. Would 'Hermann und Doro* thea' have been equally good if told in prose? It is with prose narrative that narrative poetry has to compete, but competition might come to appear preposterous if we could assign to either literary form its proper field of action. The depiction of the outward and the inward man, however, being common to both forms, provides no criterion.
It might be maintained, of course, that there is no criterion. Authors worth their salt are always experimenting. They will for ever want to do things unattempted yet in prose or rime. And since, with the decline and fall of Neo* Classicism the so*called genre tranché has lost favour, it is small matter for wonder that moderns should be treated not only to novels in verse but to epics in prose. And it is equally natural that the rate of mortality among these 'novelties' should be high. To mention only two prose*epics that used to be famous — if it were not for some exquisite, 'landscape*painting', Chateaubriand's 'Les Natchez' and 'Les Martyrs', with their monotonous Ossianic rhythms, their circumlocutions, their invocations, their personifications of abstractions, their creaking supernatural machinery, would be as dead and forgotten now as Southey's lucubrations in verse. But other conceptions prove more tenacious of life, and of such we may cite Carlyle's 'French Revolution', a genuine prose epic as we understand the term, recognised as such by John Stuart Mill immediately on its appearance, and giving, in his opinion (M. p. 278 'London and West* minster Review' of Jury, 1839), the 'authentic History' as well as the 'Poetry' of it. Though superseded as mere history by plenty of others, the book is alive to this day, because
Aber es ist auch noch mehr. Die Hauptwirkung jedes Kunstwerks beruht auf der Verbindung seiner Gestalt mit seinem Charakter. Gerade darin liegt am meisten dasj enige, was sich niemals aussprechen oder erklaren lasst, weil es allein von dem einfachen Gedanken abhangt, den der Künstler auf eine unbegreifliche Weise seinem Werk einpragt und dadurch zugleich auf uns hinübertragt. Dass nun in unsrem Gedicht die aussern und innern Formen so eng auf einander passen, dass sie sich gerade gegenseitig nur bekleiden und erfüllen, dadurch wird der Charakter
desselben in dem r einsten und vo lis ten Sinne : Einfachheit, Wahrheit,
und Natur. Das menschliche Gemüth ist darin in einer gewissen Nackt* heit dargelegt, wodurch es auf eine innigere und rührendere Weise auf uns einwirkt, als wir es bei irgend einem anderen Dichter erfahren.



of its truth to life, its colour, its power of vision, and its variety.
And alive to this day, — though, we venture to think, with its vitality just a little impaired, — is the avowed novel in verse called 'Aurora Leigh'.
There are 'superior persons' in present«day England, who cannot help sneering at Elizabeth Barrett Browning's book for being what it is, and at their Victorian grandfathers for the enthusiastic welcome they gave to it, and who always seem to forget that English#reading Frenchmen — not to mention 'lesser' Continentals — were just as enthusiastic. In a letter dated May lOth 1884 Taine wrote to Guyau, 'je suis bien content de voir que vous aimez furore Leigh, le plus vivant et le plus sincère des poèmes philosophiques.' (Quoted by Fouillée in his 'note' to the Preface of Guyau's Troblèmes de 1'Estétique contemporaine.') Living and sincere, words of the very highest praise with such theorists. And the author of a spirited article on 'Aurora Leigh' in 'The Times Literary Supplement' for July 2nd 1931 is sub* stantially of their opinion. He admits the failure of the book, as a 'novel' and as a story. But he pronounces it a success if it was really Elizabeth's intention 'to give us a sense of life in general, of people who are unmistakably Victorian, wrestling with the problems of their own time, all brightened, intensified, and compacted by the fire of poetry.'
We would take exception to a word like 'compacted', which seems far too high praise, in view of the fact that the rather melodramatic story is not really compact at all. Neither can we discover — as the 'Times Lit. Suppl.' writer does — much speed in it. It is, as Osbert Burdett observes ('The Brownings', p. 253), 'a work of impulsiveness rather than imagination', and being this, it is full of energy and intensity, but these qualities are not identical with narrative speed. And the wrestling with the problems of her own time is an undeniable fact, — but that such wrestling is not an indispensable component of a novel was proved, once and for all, by Jane Austen.
We may assume, however, that Elizabeth Browning would have scorned a comparison of her work with Jane Austen's. She was conscious of her standing as a poet, and she thought nobly of her calling. To her, poets were



the only truth«tellers now left to God
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun<skirts, through conventional grey glooms;
The only teachers who instruct mankind
From just a shadow on a charneWall
To find man's veritable stature out
Erect, sublime, — the measure of a man,
And that's the measure of an angel, says
The apostle....
(Oxf. Compl. Ed. p. 387).
Of course this effusion is in reality only one of a host of self«assertive utterances which the nineteenth century owed to romanticism,80) and may be easily matched from works of Elizabeth Browning's contemporaries in England and elsewhere. In Shakespeare we find nothing of the kind. Assertions that 'not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rime', or aspirations 'that in black ink my love may still shine bright' are on a different plane. But all this is really beside the point, which is this: that if poets are 'the only teachers that instruct mankind' we must convict Elizabeth Browning, as a 'poetical practi* tioner', of inconsistency. For this novel in verse, which in her opinion was not only her 'biggest' but her maturest work, is ostensibly written by its heroine not for the in* struction of mankind, but merely for her own use and pleasure, telling any reader at the beginning of her 'First Book':
Of writing many books there is no end; And I, who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine, — Will write my story for my better self 
This statement can admit of only one interpretation; it must mean that a literary work is better the more closely it approaches to the nature of a soliloquy; so that we find the writer of an avowed 'novel' adopting the position we
*°) Cf. Sch. p. 29 foll. — Compare alsd Sir William Watson's ultra* romantic conception: The Sovereign Poet':
He sits above the clang and dust of Time, With the world's secret trembling on his lip. He asks not converse nor companionship In the cold starlight where thou canst not climb.



discussed and rejected in our first two chapters, viz. MUl's position, which confuses egotism with sincerity. The position she took up was even more extreme than Mill's, for her practice shows that she considered sincerity incompatible with artistic restraint. As Osbert Burdett observes fop. cit. p. 259): 'Aurora Leigh seemed to her the most mature of her works because she was impulsive, and to give rein to an impulse often seems to impulsive persons the deepest revelation of themselves. This is frequently a delusion, but it is inseparable from such a character.' Anything and everything that occurred to her went into the cauldron of her 'novel', no matter whether it was relevant to the 'story' or not. On the other hand it is refreshing to find that she did not, with Mill, confine the novelist to the description of merely outward things.
The beneficial effect of restraint, even if it be the con* ventional restraint of an accepted form, is made manifest by the beautiful 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' inspired by Elizabeth Barrett's love for Robert Browning; they bid fair to live much longer on the lips and in the hearts of lovers of good literature than all the lyrical effusions that now needlessly retard the 'action' — such as it is — of 'Aurora Leigh', and we might wish that the vast majority of them had likewise been enshrined in sonnet form. Burdett speaks of 'the flashes of poetry' by which Aurora Leigh 'is light* ened here and there' (op. cit. p. 253); but this is an under* statement. Naturally a poem of such length is not without its flat passages, but one may open this novel in verse at random, sure to come upon a poetical gem ahnost im* mediately.
Here is a passage containing sufficiënt stuff for three or four fine sonnets:
Serene and unafraid of solitude
I worked the short days out, — and watched the sun
On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons
(Like some Druidic idol's fiery brass
With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,
From which the blood of wretches pent inside
Seems oozing forth to incarnadine the air)
Push out through fog with his dilated disk,
And startte the slant roofs and chimney»pota
With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog



Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void,
Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge
Had wiped out London, — or as noon and night
Had clapped together and utterly struck out
The intermediate time, undoing themselves
In the act. Your city poets see such things
Not despicable. Mountains of the south,
When drunk and mad with elemental wines
They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,
Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,
Descending Sinai: on Parnassussmount
You take a mule to climb and not a muse
Except in fable and figure: forests chant
Their anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb,
But sit in London at the day's decline,
And view the city perish in the mist
Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea,
The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,
Sucked down and choked to silence — then, surprised
By a sudden sense'of vision and of tune,
You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,
And you and Israel's other singing girls,
Aye, Miriam with them, sing the song you chose.
(op. cit. pp. 212, 213)
That notwithstanding the 'initial manifesto' and the lyricism of passages like the above, the book was written with more than half an eye on a prospective audience, is placed beyond a doubt by sentence upon sentence:
'....I read her books. Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh....'
Surely it cannot be Aurora's intention to enlighten 'her better self' by means of this bit of information, since she is married to that same cousin, Romney Leigh, at the mo* ment of writing it. Eighteen lines further on we read again:
.... 'Romney, Romney Leigh. / have not named my cousin hitherto, (our italics) And yet I used him as a sort of friend '
and we know ourselves for the beneficiaries of the intelli* gence vouchsafed, as it is obvious that Aurora's 'better self' is not — in spite of a certain forgetfulness on Aurora's part — in want of it any more than of the admonishing note in a passage like



Or else I sate on in my chamber green,
And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed
My prayers without the vicar; read my books.
Without considering whether they were fit
To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits, — so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
SouWorward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth —
'T is then we get the right good from a book.
As a matter of fact it is difficult if not impossible to discover much difference between Aurora*Elizabeth's 'nar* rative attitude 'and that taken up by Jane*Charlotte in the 'Reader*I*married*him' pages of 'Jane Eyre', and the contra* diction between the former's practice and her flaunting manifesto only proves that, by the time when 'Aurora Leigh' was written, romantic self*sufficiency, from being the boast of Titanesque figures like Byron, was in great danger of becoming something commonplace. This is not to say that Elizabeth Browning's was a commonplace nature. But she was a romantic and the romantic 'cries' in fashion became, if not exactly hers, — 'cries' can have little to do with the subconscious springs of the imagination — at any rate Aurora's. In similar fashion she was caught by the humani* tarian movement of the time, and, by means of Romney's outpourings, helped to make Victorian drawing*rooms real* ize that 'something must be done'.
Judged merely as a novel, apart not only from its sub* jectivism and its humanitarianism but from its verse, the story lacks distinction. Novels with the 'happy endings' dear to the ingenuous belong as a rule to one of two classes: either we have two lovers who — to prove once more that 'the course of true love never did run smooth' — after being separated by untoward circumstances, heartless parents and wicked schemers, are united at last; — or we see two spir* ited characters who fancy themselves in hopeless opposi* tion for the greater part of the book, but are yet, in spite of themselves, drawn together, and fall into each other's arms at the end. 'Aurora Leigh' belongs to the latter cate* gory, and the drastic means used by the writer to bring about the wished*for consummation — including a baffled misalliance, the forcible abduction of an innocent girl, and



an eyesight*destroying conflagration — contrast very sharply with the less violent but far more convincing ways by which Jane Austen leads Darcy to Elizabeth Bennet and Elizabeth to him. And besides, 'Aurora Leigh' contains in* consistencies that, to an observant reader, are simply per* plexing. It must have been some satanic sprite that (in the 'Second Book') induced its author to declare, è propos of Romney Leigh:
I attest
The conscious skies and all their daily suns, / think 1 loved him not, — nor then, nor since, Nor ever,' (our italics) —
whereas the forgetful heroine, at the very moment when she is supposed to commit this protestation to paper, — is married to her 'dear Romney', some time after confessing her love to him, — in an agony of weeping, of course, — when he refused to believe she feit anything for him but pity....
'....what women cannot say at all
But weeping bitterly (the pride kceps up,
Until the heart breaks under it) I love, —
I love you, Romney. *
'Silence!' he exclaimed. 'A woman's pity sometimes makes her mad. A man's distraction must not cheat his soul — To take advantage of it Yet, 't is hard — Farewell, Aurora.'
'But I love you, sir; And when a woman says she loves a man, The man must hear her, though he love her not..
I love you, loved you loved you first and last,
And love you on for ever. Now I know
I loved you always, Romney ' ('Ninth Book').
Such are the sorrowful chances when an authoress forgets she is engaged upon an 'autobiography'. But lapses like the above are independent of the metrical form deliberately adopted for this 'novel', which, for all the melodramatic elements it contains, is yet true to type, since it steers clear of what is downright marvellous. As the character of this book precludes dogmatizing, we will not be unduly dog* matic by assigning to poetry and prose their several, not to be encroached on, spheres of action. We may assert, how*



ever, that just as poetry transcends prose as a vehicle of the marvellous, prose transcends poetry when the author's aim is to entertain the reader by the delineation of every* day life. 'Narrative poetry is apt to be spoilt by ambition', as W. P. Ker has it on page 281 of his 'Form and Style'. Those who imagine that the plastic power of the 'shape* giving author' — Humboldt's gestaltende Dichter — is necessarily the same, whether he expresses himself in prose or in poetry, overlook a very important point.
And the point is this: a novel is nothing if it is devoid of proper character*drawing. This character*drawing may be done either 'directly', by means of narrative description, — a way which is common to both poetry and prose, — or 'indirectly', i. e. dramatically, by means of dialogue. And as a vehicle for dialogue verse is at a decided disadvantage compared with prose. For one thing, verse*dialogue is apt to lack animation. There is too much 'normalizing' in it, and little opportunity for convincing repartee. Stichomyths — beloved, as we have seen, by William Morris — tend to become monotonous, and conversation in verse nearly always makes the impression of having been 'telescoped'. Of course it is possible — though barely possible — to avoid this snare, but Elizabeth Browning does not. Next, the characters in* variably express themselves in the author's own dialect. Such a thing is far more easily obviated in prose than in poetry, the mere verse*form inevitably acting as a kind of cothurnus, so that Romney, Lady Waldemar and Marian Erle speak in 'Aurorean' images and cadences, just like Aurora herself.
Listen to Romney Leigh, the social reformer, the statisti* cian, 'overfull' of what was as Aurora was 'overbold for what might be'. In the 'Second Book' we are told how he has found a volume of Greek poetry belonging to Aurora, to whom he brings it:
' Read it? Not a word.
I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in 't, Whereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits: I rather bring it to the witch.'
'My book.
You found it '
'In the hollow by the stream That beach leans down into — of which you said The Oread in it has a Naiad's heart And pines for water 



.... That book of yours, I have not read a page of; but I toss A rose up — it falls calyx down, you see! The chances are that, being a woman, young And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes,
You write as well and ill upon the whole,
As other women....
.... You, you are young As Eve with nature's daybreak on her face, But this same world you are come to, dearest coz, Has done with keeping birthdays, saves her wreaths To hang upon her ruins, — and forgets To rime the cry with which she still beats back Those savage, hungry dogs that hunt her down To the empty grave of Christ The world's hard pressed; The sweat of labour in the early curse Has (turning acrid in six thousand years) Become the sweat of torture. Who has time,
An hour's time thinkl — to sit upon a bank
And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands? When Egypt's slain, I say, let Miriam sing! — Before — where's Moses?'
For a man who (we are told in the 'Third Book') 'lives by diagrams', and who
'crosses out the spontaneities
Of all his individual, personal life
With formal universal',
this is very imaginative language, and the discrepancy is greater here than in the case of Lady Waldemar, who is represented as a worldly woman of more than average in* telügence. Worldliness and imaginative qualities are quite compatible with each other. The lady is very neatly introduced:
She had the low voice of your English dames,
Unused, it seems, to need rise half a note
To catch attention, — and their quiet mood.
As if they lived too high above the earth
For that to put them out in anything:
So gentle, because verily so proud;
So wary and afraid of hurting you,
By no means that you are not really vile,
But that they would not touch you with their foot
To push you to your place; so selbpossessed
Yet gracious and conciliating, it takes
An effort in their presence to speak truth:
You know the sort of woman, — brilliant stuff,
And out of nature.
111



The introduction is not belied by the conversation — or confession, since she assumes Aurora to be practically sex» less — that we are treated to next. Lady Waldemar calls Aurora a 'Muse' and her somewhat elevated lodgings 'Olym* pus'. In a reassuring tone she tells her she has not come in search of a 'lioness' for her drawing*rooms, though she confesses she has 'played at wild*beast shows' like other women of her class. At this moment, however, she is, like Androcles, at the mercy of a particular lion, viz. Romney Leigh, with whom she is in love, for whose sake she has gone in for slumming and 'social work' and even studied the works of 'his socialists', Fourier, Proudhon, Considérant, Louis Blanc, 'with various others'. But Romney 'merely warmed his feet' at her heart, which was 'made firewood for his sake and flaming up to his face'. Lady Waldemar protests she is not jesting, or if she is, it is 'as martyrs jest, dear, upon the axe which kills them'. As regards Romney's impending marriage, she spoke to him in strong terms about it, telling him it was throwing his name 'down to the gut* ter, for a fire*escape to future generations'. And now she requests Aurora to come and see the girl whose eyes are to act as a solvent to 'the lineal pearl and pride of all your lofty race of Leighs'. For she, Lady Waldemar, will gain time in this way, — and she is very much in love 
'Am I coarse?
Well, love's coarse, nature 's coarse — ah, there's the rub! We fair fine ladies, who park out our lives From common sheep-paths, cannot help the crows From flying over, — we 're as natural still As Blowsalinda '
And we discover, not without respect, that in addition to Romney's political economists, and to Shakespeare, Lady Waldemar has likewise read John Gay's 'Shepherd's Week' and Lobbin Clout's rustic praises of that blithest of lasses, Blouzelind. What could have made a Victorian lady dip into such a frivolous book? But improbable though it seems, it is, after all, within the reach of possibility, far more so than Marian Erle's language:
'If a flower Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals, You 'd soon attain to a trick of looking up '



It is a beautiful image, but it is Aurora's. And Marian's account of the words of comfort Romney spoke to her, and her comment on them, are likewise every bit Aurora's..
'I repeat his words, But not his ton es: can any one repeat The music of an organ, out of church? And when he said "poor child", I shut my eyes To feel how tenderly his voice broke through. As the ointment-box broke on the Holy feet To let out the rich medicative nard."
In the Tourth Book', indeed, Aurora acknowledges her 'editing' of Marian's words:
'I have rather writ The thing I understood so, than the thing I heard so....'
And she goes on to admit the lack of another gift that literary 'fashioners' ought to possess:
.... 'I cannot render right Her quick gesticulation, wild yet soft, Self-startled from the habitual mood she used, Half sad, half languid, — like dumb creatures (now A rustling bird, and now a wandering deer, Or squirrel 'gainst the oak-gloom flashing up His sidelong burnished head, in just her way Of savage spontaneity), that stir Abruptly the green silence of the woods. And make it stranger, holier, more profound, As Nature's general heart confessed itself Of life, and then feil backward on repose.'
Though somewhat violent as a comparison, this is fine poetry. And we must not complain that it fails to lift Marian's figure out of the depth of unreality, seeing that 'Aurora' gave us fair warning a moment before. Between skill in character*drawing and utter lack of it there are intermediate stages, and Elizabeth might have made good as a delineator of character, — her description of Lady Walde* mar warrants the assumption, — if she had been less head* long; if the metrical form chosen by her had not increased rather than diminished this defect, and if the resources of prose with its countless opportunities for indirect character* drawing had been turned to proper account by her. Evident* ly she was not the woman to bring the thing off in iambics,
8



— and what, if not the insidious power of verse, caused her to mix stilted, archaic phrases with intentional vulgarisms? 'Blush not, Nell,' she makes one sempstress say to another, 'Thy curls be red enough without thy cheeks,' which is al* most immediately followed by
'Lucy Gresham swooned hut night, Dropped sudden in the street while going home; And now the baker says, who took her up And laid her by her grandmother in bed, He '11 give her a week to die in. Pass the silk. Let's hope he gave her a loaf too, within reach, For otherwise they '11 starve before they die, That funny pair of bedfellows! Miss Bell,
I '11 thank you for the scissors Marian Erle!
Why, Marian Erle, you 're not the fooi to cry? Your tears spoil Lady Waldemar's new dress, You piece of pity!'
But in the same 'Fourth Book' from which we have quoted there is an attempt at real dialogue, an attempt on a grand scale. It is when Aurora, with her cousin and other noble gentlemen and highborn ladies, is waiting, 'by the altar*stair\ for the bride and her bridesmaids:
We waited. It was early: there was time For greeting and the morning's compliment, And gradually a ripple of women's talk Arose and feil and tossed about a spray Of English ss, soft as a silent hush, And, notwithstanding, quite as audible As louder phrases thrown out by the men.
— 'Yes, really, if we need to wait in church We need to talk there.' — 'She? 't is Lady Ayr, In blue — not purple! that's the dowager,'
— 'She looks as young' — 'She flirts as young, you mean. Why if you had seen her upon Thursday night,
You 'd call Miss Norris modest' — 'You again!
I waltzed with you three hours back. Up at six,
Up still at ten; scarce time to change one's shoes:
I feel as white and sulky as a ghost,
So pray don't speak to me, Lord Belcher.' — 'No,
I '11 look at you instead, and it's enough
While you have that face.' 'In church, my lord! fie, fie!'
'Adair, you stayed for the Division?' — 'Lost
By one.' — The devil it is! '
It is clever, but it only supplies a chorus, with effects that are static. It subserves no development of character, in fact



the chief characters are out of it. And the thing does not bear repetition, whereas telling bits of description can al* ways be enjoyed. We have never seen those of the 'Sixth Book', in which Marian takes Aurora to her 'home' on the outskirts of Paris, singled out for praise. Yet they deserve it:
....the peopled streets being all dismissed, House-rows and groups all scattered like a flock, The market-gardens thickened, and the long White walls beyond, like spiders' outside threads, Stretched, feeling blindly toward the country-fields Through half-built habitations and half-dug Foundations, — intervals of trenchant chalk That bit betwixt the grassy uneven turfs Where goats (vine-tendrils trailing from their mouths) Stood perched on edges of the cellarage Which should be, staring as about to leap • To find their coming Bacchus.... All's sad, the country struggling with the town, Like an untamed hawk upon a strong man's fist, That beats its wings and tries to get away 
But the subjectivism of the book is revealed in much more than this. It might have for its title: 'The Life and Opinions of Aurora Leigh: Being a violent and unconvincing story drowned in endless assertive comment.' Its excellencies are of the lyric, not of the narrative kind. And though we have reserved a special chapter on 'the encroachments of lyricism' in connection with Tennyson, we might just as well use the word here, especially as Elizabeth Browning often sets her words to genuine Tennysonian tunes. Com* pare again Aurora's walk with Marian:
Then she led The way, and I, as by a narrow plank Across devouring waters, followed her, Stepping by her footsteps, breathing by her breath. And holding her with eyes that would not slip; And so, without a word, we walked a mile. And so, another mile, without a word.
The book, however, was launched on the world as a novel, and as such it has found a place for discussion here. And anyone who should complain that it fails to conform to the regular type of novel, has, by its authoress, been forestalled, thus:
115



Trust the spirit,
As sovran nature does, to make her form; For otherwise we only imprison spirit And not embody. Inward evermore To outward, — so in life, and so in art 
But surely, those are not the words of a narrative poet, of a shape*giver, a fashioner. In this way a poem is left to fashion itself. Both Humboldt and Goethe would have shaken their heads at this ne plus ultra of romanticism. It might, indeed, be claimed with some show of reason that in this giving the rein to her mental expansiveness she followed the lead of a prose*novelist, of the writer of 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy', a book heavy with subjectivism. But this book, if subjective to a fault, contains faultless character*drawing. Besides, it is full of humour, to which its digressive method ministers. In both these respects 'Aurora Leigh' is its inferior.
§ 2. Whatever its faults, there is an abundance of both humour and character*drawing in a versemovel which in its time came in for a good deal of 'Victorian' abuse, — not so much because of its hexameters as because of its alleged 'licentiousness' — viz. in Clough's 'Bothie of Toberma* Vuolich: A LonpVacation PastoraV We know from a letter, written by the author to Emerson (to be found on p. 136 of 'The Poems and Prose Remains of A. H. Clough, Edited by his Wife, Vol. I. London 1869) that Kingsley praised 'The Bothie' in Fraser; but The Spectator was contemptuous; and in Oxford, though there had been a fair sale and much talk of it, the verdict was, that it was 'indecent and profane, immoral and (!) communistic.'
The poem had first appeared, under a slightly different title, in the fateful year 1848, a circumstance which, though it cannot exculpate the faultfinders and slanderers, may perhaps be adduced in extenuation of their offence. But the storm, such as it was, must have subsided pretty soon, for barely a dozen years afterwards, when Matthew Arnold referred to the poem in his 'On Translating Homer', he ignored any flutter it had caused, merely calling attention to certain points, chiefly technical, in connection with it. Thus:
'Most of you, probably, have some knowledge of a poem



by Mr. Clough, The Bothie of Toper*na*fuosich, a long* vacation pastoral, in hexameters. The general merits of that poem I am not going to discuss: it is a serio*comic poem, and, therefore, of essentially different nature from the Iliad. Still in two things it is, more than any other English poem which I can call to mind, like the Iliad: in the rapidity of its movement, and the plainness and directness of its style. The thought of this poem is often curious and subtle, and that is not Homeric; the diction is often grotesque, and that
is not Homeric. Still this poem...., being as I say a
serioscomic poem, has a right to be grotesque.... Mr. Clough's odd epithets, "The grave man nicknamed Adam," "The hairy Aldrich", and so on, grow vitally and appear
naturally in their place Mr. Clough's hexameters are
excessively, needlessly rough; still owing to the native rapidity of this measure, and to the directness of style which so well allies itself with it, his composition also
produces , — the sense of having, within short limits
of time, a large portion of human life presented to him, instead of a small portion.'
Though not greatly caring whether Clough's narrative poem in order to deserve praise must be rated 'Homeric' or not, we are by no means unwilling to make Arnold's verdict our own. Many a reader, indeed, will think it hits the mark better than does the 'label' or title supplied by its own author, the first part of which repels rather than at* tracts by its uncouthness, whereas the second promises something different from what is actually given. It is true that to a band of merry undergraduates from Oxford any long*vacation hike, even in stern and wild Caledonia, may suggest Tempé or the dales of Arcady. But it does not follow that a record of their adventures treated in a serio* comic vein will yield a pastoral or even the mere burlesque of a pastoral. In fact it is only towards the end of the third section or canto that we come upon a passage which, instead of mock*Homeric, might be called mock*bucolic. It is when Hobbes, 'briefesbkilted of heroes,' 'the great Hobbes, con* templative, corpulent, witty, Author forgotten and silent of currentest phrases and fancies, mute and exuberant by turns', comments on the report that Philip Hewson has fallen in love with a Highland lassie:



'Did you not say she was seen
every day in her beauty and bedgown Doing plain household work,
as washing, cooking, scouring? How could he help but love her?
nor lacked there perhaps the attraction That, in a blue cotton print
tucked up over striped linseywoolsey, Barefoot, barelegged, he beheld her,
with arms bare up to the elbows. Bending with fork in her hand
in a garden uprooting potatoes? Is not Katie as Rachel,
and is not Philip a Jacob? Truly Jacob, supplanting
a hairy Highland Esau? Shall he not, lovesentertained,
feed sheep for the Laban of Rannoch? Patriarch happier he,
the long servitude ended of wooing, If when he wake in the morning
he find not a Leah beside him!
It is immaterial that Hobbes alludes here to words used by Philip himself long before, when, in a rattling vein, he was 'holding forth'. Philip was perfectly serious at the time. If Hobbes repeats his tirades with his tongue in his cheek, Philip's tongue simply voiced his ultra»democratie mind:
Never (of course you will laugh,
but of course all the same I shall say it), Never, believe me, I knew
of the feelings between men and women, Till in some village fields
in holidays now getting stupid, One day sauntering 'long and listless',
as Tennyson has it, Long and listless strolling ,
ungainly in hobbadiboyhood, Chanced it my eye feil aside
on a capless, bonnetless maiden, Bending with three*pronged fork
in a garden uprooting potatoes. Was it the air? who can say?
or herself, or the charm of the labour? But a new thing was in me;
and longing delicious possessed me, Longing to take her and lift her,
and put her away from her slaving. Was it embracing or aiding
was most in my mind? hard question!



But this 'encounter', which taught him something of Fer* dinand's feelings for Miranda, excited his repugnance against girls of his own station, their 'giggling and toying and coying' and their 'balls, dances, and evening parties':
Oh, if they knew and considered,
unhappy onesl oh, could they see, could But for a moment discern,
how the blood of true gallantry kindies How the old knightly religion,
the chivalry semisquixotic Stirs in the veins of a man
at seeing some delicate woman Serving him, toiling — for him,
and the world; some tcnderest girl, now Overweighted, expectant,
of him, is it? who shall, if only Duly her burden be lightened,
not wholly removed from her, mind you, Lightened if but by the love,
the devotion man only can offer. Grand on her pedestal rise
as urn«bearing statue of Hellas.... Oh, if they saw it and knew it;
we soon should see them abandon Boudoir, toilette, carriage,
drawing'room, and balbroom, Satin for worsted exchange,
gros»desnaples for plain linseywoolsey, Sandals of silk for clogs,
for health lackadaisical fancies! So, feel women, not dolls;
so feel the sap of existence Circulate up through their roots
from the farsaway centre of all things, Circulate up from the depths
to the bud on the twig that is topmostl Yes, we should see them delighted,
delighted ourselves in the seeing, Bending with blue cotton gown
skirted up over striped linsey#woolsey, Milking the kine in the field,
like Rachel, watering cattle, Rachel, when at the well
the predestined beheld and kissed her, Or, with pail upon head,
like Dora beloved of Alexis, Comely, with welbpoised pail
over neck arching soft to the shoulders, Comely in gracefullest act,
one arm uplifted to stay it,



Home from the river or pump
moving stately and calm to the laundry, Ay, doing household work,
which some one, after all, must do, Needful, graceful therefore,
as washing, cooking, and scouring, Or, if you please, with the fork
in the garden, uprooting potatoes.
It is always a hazardous thing to account for a work of literature by assigning to its author certain definite impulses, tacitly assuming that these impulses made themselves feit throughout and to the very end of the creative process. It is a hazardous thing, since in doing so we always tend to forget not only the number of promising 'openings' that have led to nothing, attempts given up soon after being start* ed and left to lie yellowing and mouldering in drawer or desk; but likewise the countless poems and prose*works that, once begun, took a different direction from the one the author had originally in his mind, going 'off the metals', so to say, albeit without coming to any real grief, and achieving, not infrequently, a very pleasing result. And if a writer has apparently spared us this trouble by stating his ostensible aim when he took up his pen, and by 'account* ing' for the literary form he fixed upon, — even then we must exercise due caution, reflecting how often the springs of a man's action are hidden from himself, nay, how impos* sible it is that he should have full conscious knowledge of the mental determinants of any action. When Clough wound up the letter to Emerson to which we have already referred with the words: 'Convey to Mr. Longfellow the fact that it was a reading of his 'Evangeline' aloud to my mother and sister, which, coming after a reperusal of the 'Iliad', occa* sioned this outbreak of hexameters', — these words, however honestly meant, need not and should not persuade us of their full and absolute truth. 'Evangeline' was, no doubt, partly inspired by Goethe's 'Hermann und Dorothea', and owes its hexameters to German influence. Clough was well* read in Goethe, and 'Dora beloved of Alexis', in the quota* tion given above, is a direct allusion to Goethe's idyll in hexameters 'Alexis und Dora'. It follows that in the case of the Bothie it is only reasonable to infer direct German in* fluence, whether Clough was conscious of it at the time of composition or not. And this inference receives support



from two significant facts. The first is that, whereas Long* fellow's poem is free from 'Homeric' suggestions or manner» isms, such as the epitheton ornans, Goethe's is not, and his kïuge, verstandige Hausfrau and edle verstandige Pfarr* herr are only two instances out of many. Clough simply revels in them, for the fun of it. The second fact is that 'Evangeline' is all but devoid of humorous touches. But 'Hermann und Dorothea' has many, although, again, not quite so many as 'The Bothie of Tober*na*Vuolich'. Besides, whereas Goethe's humour — as in his treatment of 'the slow and deliberate chemist' — is quiet and, so to say, demure, Clough's is exuberant and boisterous, fond of emphasis and laughing exaggerations. He travesties Homer, calling cigar» smoking Lindsay a cloud*compeller; combining grotesque* looking Gaelic names into grin*compelling excuses for hexameters:
Wherefore in Badenoch drear,
in lofty Lochaber, Lochiel, and Knoydart, Moydart, Morrer,
Ardgower, and Ardnamurchan, Wandereth he who should either
with Adam be studying logic, Or by the lochside of Rannoch
on Katie his rhetoric using.... ?
He makes of his novel*in*verse a veritable cooking»pot, into which he flings all manner of ingredients; beans and bones and bacon as well as Irish bulls:
What, and is not one man,
fellow-men, as good as another? Faith, replied Pat, and a deal better tooi
Mock»heroic phrases abound. He even dares, he, the clas* sical scholar, the teacher, the pedagogue, to apostrophize the Muse and — in the words of one of his own creatures, to abuse the classics:
To-morrow we start on our travel. Lo, the weather is golden,
the weather-glass, say they, rising; Four weeks here have we read;
four weeks will we read hereafter; Three weeks hence will return
and think of classes and classics, Fare ye well, meantime,



forgotten, unnamed, undreamt of, History, Science, and Poetst
lo, deep in dustiest cupboard, Thookydid, Oloros'son,
Halimoosian, here lieth buriedl Slumber in Liddell-and-Scott,
O musical chaff of old Athens, Dishes, and fishes, bird, beast,
and sesquipedalian blackguardl Sleep, weary ghosts, be at peace
and abide in your lexicon-limbo 1 Sleep, as in lava for ages
your Herculanean kindred, Sleep, for aught that I care,
'the sleep that knows no waking,' vEschylus, Sophocles, Homer,
Herodotus, Pindar, and Plato. Three weeks hence be it time
to exhume our dreary classics.
Let it be duly noted, however, that this fooling is in no way akin to disrespect. Clough's f amiliarity with Homer and the rest was evidently of the welLknown kind that instead of breeding contempt breeds affection, that sort of affection which feels irresistibly impelled to take liberties with the object on which it spends itself. A similar feeling must, een* turies ago, have induced some Icelandic sagaman to cause his beloved Thor to be the questionable hero of foolish encounters in giant's gloves and the like. And it is a similar feeling, no doubt, that makes pious Flemish peasants crack innumerable jokes about St. Peter at heaven's gate. If this diagnosis did not fit Clough's case, surely 'The Bothie' would not so often rise to high seriousness in splendid pas* sages that betray the student of the Greek classics as infal* libly as is done by the lighter, more flippant ones. Even grotesque imitation is a kind of flattery. But the flattery be* comes fealty when a fine mind steeped in Homer chooses Homeric moulds for original imaginings.
Listen to Philip:
I was as one that sleeps
on the rail way; one who dreaming Hears thro' his dream the name
of his home shouted out; hears and hears not,— Faint, and louder again,
and less loud, dying in distance; Dimly conscious, with something



of inward debate and choice, — and Sense of claim and reality present,
anon relapses Nevertheless, and continues
the dream and fancy, while forward Swiftly, remorseless, the car
presses on, he knows not whither.
Listen to Elspie confessing her trepidation to Philip:
You are too strong, you see, Mr. Philip I
just like the sea there, Which will come, through the straits
and all between the mountains Forcing its great strong tide
into every nook and inlet, Getting far in, up the quiet
stream of sweet inland water, Sucking it up, and stopping it,
turning it, driving it backward, Quite preventing its own quiet running:
and then, soon after, Back it goes off, Ieaving weeds
on the shore, and wrack and uncleanness: And the poor burn in the glen
tries again its peaceful running, But it is brackish and tainted,
and all its banks in disorder. That was what I dreamt all last night.
I was the burnie, Trying to get along through
the tyrannous brine, and could not; I was confined and squeezed
in the coils of the great salt tide, that Would mixsin itself with me,
and change me; I feit myself changing; And I struggled, and screamed, I believe,
in my dream. It was dreadful. You are too strong, Mr. Philip I
I am but a poor slender burnie, Used to the glens and the rocks,
the rowan and birch of the woodies, Quite unused to the great salt sea;
quite afraid and unwilling.
And again we request the reader to listen to Philip as he is communing with himself sitting alone in the mountain (Section IV): i
Spirits escaped from the body
can enter and be with the living; Entering unseen, and retiring unquestioned.



they bring, — do they feel too? — Joy, pure joy, as they mingle
and mix inner essence with essence; Would I were dead, I keep saying,
that so I could go and uphold her! Joy, pure joy, bringing with them,
and, when they retire, leaving after No cruel shame, no prostration,
despondency; memories rather, Sweet happy hopes bequeathing.
Ah! wherefore not thus with the living? Would I were dead, I keep saying
that so I could go and uphold her! It is impossible, say you,
these passionate fervent impulsions, These projections of spirit to spirit,
these inward embraces, Should in strange ways, in her dreams,
should visit her, strengthen her, shield her? Is it possible, rather,
that these great floods of feeling Lettingtin daily from me
towards her should, impotent wholly, Bring neither sound nor motion
to that sweet shore they heave to? Efflux here, and there
no stir or pulse of influx! Would I were dead, I keep saying,
that so I could go and uphold her! Surely, surely, when sleepless
I lie in the mountain lamenting, Surely, surely, she hears •
in her dreams a voice, 'I am with thee, Saying, 'although not with thee,
behold, for we mated our spirits Then, when we stood in the chamber,
and knew not the words we were saying, Yea, if she feit me within her,
when not with one finger I touched her, Surely, she knows it, and feels it,
while sorrowing here in the moorland. Would I were dead, I keep saying,
that so I could go and uphold her !
According to Hudson who quotes these lines with admira* tion in 'AHind in Richmond Park' (p. 49), Clough has voiced here a universal feeling, giving to the 'burning desire to be with and comfort the absent one, its most perfect expression', and we are glad to have his opinion, in view of the super* ciliousness with which Clough is treated by certain postwar 'critics', Hugh Kingsmill for instance, who, in his book on



'Matthew Arnold' (p. 39), though kind enough to admit that the author of 'The Bothie of Tober*na*Vuolich' 'had natu* rally some sense of humour', does not scruple to maintain that he 'wrote nothing that has survived till to*day', apart from two small lyrics. Hudson's opinion preceded Kings* mill's shattering verdict by barely six years, and is a refu* tation in itself, one champion like Hudson sufficing, in our opinion, to secure to a poet's work length of days. But our concern in this enquiry is with form, and we quoted the passage given above because this time we hear no Homeric echoes but Theocritean. Or rather let us say that nobody could have written this lyrical outburst in hexameters — which, thanks to a 'refrain' impresses the reader as a succes* sion of stanzas — except a classical scholar familiar with Theocritus II ('The Spell') and with Bion's 'Lament for Adonis'.
Once Clough had started writing a poem in hexameters, it is easy to see how the rest, the simile, the lyrical cry etc., could not help following. What a writer's mind has assi* milated will commend itself, regardless of origins, as suit* able matter for his pen, and will of itself pour into moulds resembling or suggesting those which constant study and companionship, has taught him not only to appreciate but to consider too fit and too self * justifying to need any special vindication. Thus, in the heyday of Gothic, architects would without taking thought on the matter, 'express themselves' by means of pointed arches and lancet windows. But with suchlike externals Clough's indebtedness to the Classics stops. His treatment of love, which owes little if anything to them, does seem — in its representation of Philip losing his heart in shockingly rapid succession to three different girls — to owe something to the author of 'Romeo and Juliet'. His responses to nature are romantic. His ideas are modern in the fullest sense of the word. Almost the whole witch's cauldron of nineteenth century thought is seen 'on the boil' in his poem. We know that he was a radical and a democrat, feeling out of place in the antediluvianism of Oxford. He must have invested Philip Hewson, Chartist and poet, with several of his own characteristics, making hun the mouth=piece of his convictions, and semüconvic» tions. Once he appears to anticipate Nietzsche, when Philip,



fancying himself in love with the Lady Maria, exclaims, 'old faith and doctrine abjuring':
What of the poor and the weary?
their labour and pain is needed. Perish the poor and the wearyI
what can they better than perish, Perish in labour for her,
who is worth the destruction of empires? Dig in thy deep dark prison,
O miner! and fin ding be thankful: Though unpolished by thee,
unto thee unseen in perfection, While thou art eating black bread
in the poisonous air of thy cavern, Far away glitters the gem
on the peerless neck of a Princess. Dig, and starve, and be thankful;
it is so, and thou hast been aiding 
Yea, what is more, be rich,
O ye rich! be sublime in great houses, Purple and delicate linen endure;
be of Burgundy patiënt; Suffer that service be done you,
permit of the page and the valet, Vex not your souls with annoyance
of charity schools or of districts, Cast not to swine of the stye
the pearls that should gleam in your foreheads.
But this 'Nietzschean' outburst stands alone, and our enquiry is far more concerned with the aesthetic theory repeatedly enunciated by Clough in the plastic form of
'a capless, bonnetless maiden, Bending with three*pronged fork
in a garden uprooting potatoes.'
The grand thought that nobody, not even the lowliest worker, is 'vulgar' when engaged in the honest exercise of his calling, nay, that, dressed as the occasion requires, and handling the necessary implements, he presents a scène not more 'edifying' morally than truly aesthetic, anticipates Guyau. And we may observe that Clough's artistic practice agrees with his theory. Embodying in a verse*novel his vision of contemporary life, he succeeded remarkably well in combining the natural advantages of prose fiction, such as largeness of canvas, indirect character*drawing, and idea*



discussing dialogue, with the verbal economy and rhythmical power of good verse and that adequate rendering of lyrical, passionate moments which will always seem to belong to the domain of poetry rather than prose. And much of this success is due to his diction, which is far more natural than Elizabeth Browning's.
Even the mock*heroic parts combine in a perfectly satis* factory way with the rest, since they are of the kind that may naturally occur in talk that is jovial or burschikos. We have indeed had — in Matthew Arnold's words — a large portion of life presented to us. And we have witnessed the soundings of many depths, social, politieal, philosophical, even religious, though (as will happen in such cases) the men heaving the lead relieved the strain of their labour by being flippant. It is far more than the 'longovacation pastor* al' it purports to be. It is a verse*novel vindicating the whole genre.



CHAPTER VIL Die*hards: Tbird Group. Romancers.
§ 1 After dealing with a number of important narrative poems which it is easy, or at any rate convenient to label either 'epic' or 'novel', we shall find a considerable group remaining to which neither term can in justice be apphed. The preponderance of some lovennterest distinguishes them from epics proper; the presence of marvellous elements or a greater dependence upon moving or stirring incident marks them off from that literary genre to which we assign ^lurora Leigh and Clough's Bothie. It would seem best to call them romances, and their authors romancers.
The stories they teil are not, as a rule, the poets own inventions or the immediate fruits of their own experience; they are derived from some source. The raw stuff of Kings* ley's Andromeda is a myth; mythic, too, is Apuleius' story of Cupid and Psyche, elaborated (often enough without any poetical gain, not infrequently with actual loss of narrative momentum) by Robert Bridges; whereas James Thomson, emulating Keats — the Keats of 'Isabella' — in his Weddah and OnueUBonain, has his imagination set on fire by a mere anecdote, found in Stendhal's De TAmour.
What claims our attention in considering the straight* forward, buoyant narrative of Kingsley's Andromeda, one of the very best things its versatile author ever wrote, is chiefly its versification. To say this is not to say anything in disparagement of the many telling touches of all kinds — descriptive, heroic, pathetic — with which Kingsley, while following the original fable quite closely, has enlivened his simple tale, merely the heroic rescue of a damsel in distress; and we may observe here that the poet s attitude towards it is essentially the same as that which we find him adopting a few years afterwards in his prose book The Heroes: symbolism, whether explicit or suggested, there is none. But the story as he tells it is entrancing never* theless, and whoever should deny to it the right to rank as poetry, on the plea that it is not a soliloquy of the soul, would only make himself ridiculous. The great thing, however, about Andromeda is its metre:



real hexameters, not excuses for them like so many of Clough's stumbling lines in the Bothie. Here was something new. It had been attempted before, but never with entirely successful, often with disastrous, effects. Kingsley, however, handles the metre with ease and elegance, and though his hexameters may occasionally be found fault with, he can never be said to have come to grief over them M)
'Mystical fish of the seas, dread Queen whom /Ethiops honour, Whelming the land in thy wrath, unavoidable, sharp as the sting«ray, Thou, and thy brother the Sun, braiiKsmiting, lord of the sheepfold, Scorching the earth all day, and then resting at night in thy bosom, Take ye this one life for many, appeased by the blood of a maiden, Fairest, and born of the fairest, a queen, most priceless of victims.' Thrice they spat as they went by the maid: but her mother delaying Fondled her child to the last, heart-crushed; and the warmth of her weeping Feil on the breast of the maid, as her woe broke forth into wailing. 'Daughter, my daughter! forgive me. Oh curse not the murderess! Curse not!
How have I sinned but in love? Do the gods grudge glory to mothers?
Weeping she clung to the knees of the maid; and the maid low answered, *Curse thee! Not in the death.pang!' The heart of the lady was lightened. Slowly she went by the ledge; and the maid was alone in the darkness. Watching the pulse of the oars die down, as her own died with them, Tearless, dumb with amaze she stood, as a stornvstunned nestling Pallen from bough or from eave lies dumb, which the home*going herdsman
Fancies a stone, till he catches the light of its terrified eyeball, So through the long long houw the maid stood helpless and hopeless, Wide*eyed, downward gazing in vain at the black blank darkness. Feebly at last she began, while wild thoughts bubbled within her —
'O false sea! false sea! I dreamed what I dreamed of thy goodness; Dreamed of a smile in thy gleam, of a laugh in the plash of thy rippleI'alse and devouring thou art, and the great world dark and despiteful.' Awed by her own rash words she was still; and her eyes to the seaward Looked for an answer of wrath: far off, in the heart of the darkness, Bnght white mists rose slowly: beneath them the wandering ocean Glimmered and glowed to the deepest abyss; and the knees of the maiden
Trembled and stink in her fear, as afar, like a dawn in the midnight Rose from their seaweed chamber the choir of the mystical sea*maids.
Onward they came in their joy, and around them the lamps of the seasnymphs,
Myriad fiery globes, swam panting and heaving; and rainbows
w) Was it jalousie de métier that prevented Matthew Arnold from mentioning Kingsley's undoubted success in his 'On Translating Homer?*
9



Crimson and azure and emerald, were broken in star*showers, lighting Far through the wincdark depths of the crystal, the gardens of Nereus, Coral and sea-fan and tangle, the blooms and the palms of the ocean.
§ 2. James Thomson, the author of 'The City of Dread* ful Night', was a man of genius, who never during his Hfe* time received full recognition for having forged in the heil* fire of his existence some of the very best poetry that the Victorian age can boast of, and who has obtained scant justice at the hands of posterity. When he wrote 'Weddah and Om*el*Bonain' in ottava rima he challenged compar* ison with Keats's 'Isabella or the Pot of Basil', telling a bet* ter story and telling his story better than the man he emulated.*2) Unlike Keats he never even touches the fringe of mawkishness; and though, perhaps, a trifle less rich in quotable things, his virile verse shows a wider range, from the 'realism of romanticism' to the most splendid outbursts of romantic passion.
The first thing Thomson does to lift the stuff of this
») Here is the story as found in Stendhal's 'De 1'Amour' (pp. 180, 181)- 'Oueddah, du pays de Yamen, était renommé pour sa beauté entre les Arabes. — Lui et Om-el-Bonain, fille de Abd-el-Aziz, fils de Merouan. n'étant encore que des enfants, s'aimaient déjft tellement, que lun ne pouvait souffrir d'être un moment séparé de 1'autre. — Lorsque Onwel* Bonain devint la femme de Oualid.Ben,Abd*el*Malek, Oueddah en perdit la raison. — Après être resté longtemps dans un état dégarement et de souffrance, Ü se rendit en Syrië, et commenca ft rdder chaque jour autouT de 1'habitation de Oualid, fils de Malek, sans trouver dabord de moyen de parvenir ft ce qu'il désirait — A la fin, il fit la rencontre d une jeune fille qu'il réussit ft s'attacher ft force de persévérance et de soms. Quand ü crut pouvoir se fier ft elle, il lui demanda si elle connaissait Om-el Bonain — Sans doute, puisque c'est ma maitresse, répondit la jeune Wie.
— Eh bien! reprit Oueddah, ta maitresse est ma cousine, et, si tu veux lui porter de mes nouvelles, tu lui feras certainement plaisir. — Je lm en porterai volontiers, répondit la jeune fille. «Et la*dessus elle courut aussitöt vers Om*el*Bonain pour lui donner des nouveUes de Oueddah: «Prends garde ft ce que tu dis! s'écria cellcci. Quoi! Oueddah est vivantf-
— Assurément, dit la jeune fille — Va lui dire, poursuivit alors Om* el,Bonain, de ne point s'écarter jusqu'ft ce qu'il lui arrivé un messagcr de ma part» Elle prit ensuite ses mesures pour introduire Oueddah chez elle, oü elle le garda caché dans un coffre. Elle len faisait sortar pour être avec lui quand eUe se croyait en sureté; et, quand ü arnvait quelqu'un qui aurait pu le voir, elle le faisait rentrer dans le coffre.
II arriva un jour que 1'on apporta ft Oualid une perle, et il dit ft 1'un de ses serviteurs: «Prends cette perle et porte-la ft Om-el-Bonain.» Le serviteur prit la perle et la porta ft Om-el-Bonain. Ne s étant pas fait annoncer, Ü «ntra chez elle dans un moment oü elle était avec



anecdote, which is as dry as most of its kind, into the sphere of poetry, is to make his hero and his heroine members of the famous Azra tribe, ready to perish when they love. This point, clearly stated at the very outset, is intended to be securely grasped; it is significant and strikes the key*note of all that is to follow. As in the case of William Morris the poet identifies himself with his prospective readers, imagining, not without reason, that what would induce willing suspension of unbelief in him will perform the same service for them.
Weddah and OmselsBonain, scarcely grown To boy and girlhood from their swaddling bands, Were known where'er the Azra tribe was known, Through Araby and all the neighbouring lands; Were chanted in the songs of sweetest tone Which sprang like fountains 'mid the desert sands:
They were so beautiful that none who saw
But feit a rapture trembling into awe.
Having said this, the poet goes on immediately to prepare the reader's mind for the doom that awaits the two lovers:
Oueddah, de sorte qu'il put lancer un coup d'oeil dans 1'appartement de Om-el-Bonain sans que celle-ci y prit garde. Le serviteur de Oualid s'acquitta de sa commission et demanda quelque chose a Om*el»Bonain pour le bijou qu'il lui avait apporté. Elle le refusa sévèrement, et lui fit une réprimande. Le serviteur sortit courroucé contre elle, et, allant dire a Oualid ce qu'il avait vu, il lui décrivit le coffre oü il avait vu entrer Oueddah. «Tu mens, esclave sans mèrel Tu mens, lui dit Oualid.» Et il court brusquement chez Om>el»Bonain. II y avait dans 1'appartement plusieurs coffres; il s'assied sur celui oü était renfermé Oueddah, et que lui avait décrit 1'esclave, en disant a Om*el»Bonain: «Donn&moi un de ces coffres. — lis sont tous a toi, ainsi que moi«même, répondit Om«el* Bonain. — Eh bienl poursuivit Oualid, je désire avoir celui sur lequel je suis assis. — II y a dans celui-la des choses nécessaires & une femme, dit OmsekBonain. — Ce ne sont point ces chosesda, c'est le coffre que je désire, continua Oualid. — II est a toi,» répondit-elle. Oualid fit aussitöt emporter Ie coffre, et fit appeler deux esclaves auxquels il donna I'ordre de creuser une fosse en terre jusqu'a la profondeur oü il se trouverait de 1'eau. Approchant ensuite sa bouche du coffre: «On m'a dit quelque chose de toi, cria»t»il. Si 1'on m'a dit vrai, que toute tracé de toi soit séparée, que toute nouvelle de toi soit ensevelie. Si 1'on m'a dit faux, je ne fais rien de mal en enfouissant un coffre: ce n'est que du bois enterré.» II fit pousser alors le coffre dans la fosse, et la fit combler des pierres et des terres que 1'on en avait retirées. Depuis lors, Om«el» Bonain ne cessa de fréquenter eet endroit, et d'y pleurer jusqu'a ce qu'on 1'y trouvat un jour sans vie, la face contre terre.'



Once on a dewy evetide when the balm Of herb and flower made all the air rich wine, And still the sunless shadow of the palm Sought out the birthplace of the day divine, These two were playing in the happy calm. A young chief said: In these be sure a sign
Great God vouchsafes; a living talisman
Of glory and rich weal to bless our clan.
Proud hearts applauded; but a senior chief
Said: Perfect beauty is its own sole end;
It is ripe flower and fruit, not bud and leaf;
The promise and the blessing meet and blend,
Fulfilled at once: then malice, wrath, and grief,
Lust of the foe and passion of the friend,
Assail the marvel, for all Heil is moved Against the work of Allah most approved.
Thus beauty is that pearl a poor man found;
Which could not be surrendered, changed or sold,
Which he might never bury in the ground,
Or hide away within his girdle»fold;
But had to wear upon his brow uncrowned,
A star of storm and terrors; for, behold,
The richest kings raged jealous for its light. And just men's hearts turned robbers at the sight
But if the soul be royal as the gem,
That star of danger may flash victory too,
The younger urged, and bring the diadem
To set itself in. And the other: True;
If all Life's golden apples crown one stem,
Fate touches none; but single they are few:
And whether to defeat or triumph, this One star lights war and woe, not peaceful bliss.
But nothing recked the children in that hour, And little recked through fifteen happy years 
The short, philosophical introduction has been skilfully incorporated with the story itself, which now proceeds as rapidly as is at all compatible with the stanzaic form chosen for the narrative, stanzas being always something of a handicap to a story*teller, except when they are of the very simplest kind, — and then they are apt to weary the reader. Thomson triumphs over all difficulties. Each of his stanzas is a unit, which he manages to invest with a char* acter of its own, and in each stanza the story advances or a significant situation is 'underlined' without any detri* ment to the poet's grip on the story. Every deficiency in the



original is supplied by him, character*drawing, local colour, motivation, dramatic tensity, and particulars where the' original is satisfied with generalities. Thomson gives all that can tend to make the story acceptable, all that can prevent the reader's interest from flagging. In the middle of the tale he introducés a second foreshadowing of the end, uttered by a figure of his invention, Hassan the singer, who' is gifted with second sight. And all the while he is poles apart from, say, an author like Bernard Shaw. All the while he remains a poet.
In two successive stanzas he juxtaposes, in a seemingly unsought way, the two rivals for Om*el*Bonain's charms Weddah and Walid. The former, at whose name flushed foes turned haggard, was as terrible as he was beautiful:
'for fire
Burns most intensely in the clearest flame; The comeliest steed is ever last to tire And swiftest footed; and in war's fierce game The noblest sword is deadliest in its gyre: His gentle gravity grew keen and gay In hottest fight as for a festal day.'
(Part I, st X).
Far different was 'Walid the Syrian, Abd*el*Malek's son', not deficiënt in courage, but renowned especially
'for a scheme long planned With silent patience, and a sharp deed done When its ripe fruit leaned ready for his hand, And liberal sharing of the fruit well won '
He is evidently the man to drive a hard bargain, but to be scrupulous in performing his part of the contract. And to the Azra, who are in great straits and implore his assistance, he professes himself willing enough to do for them as much as is in his power, but they must give him what he wants 
And all their urgence broke in fuming spray Against the rock of his firm«planted will 
And so the Azra ceased from importuning him and directed their attacks, frontal or otherwise, on Abd*eUAziz:
The baffled current took a tortuous way, And drowned a happy garden green and still,
O'erwhelming Abd-el-Aziz with that gibe,
A boy and girl outvalue all our tribe?



He loved his daughter, and he loved yet more His brother's son; and now the whole tribe prest The scale against them: there was raging war, Too sure of hapless issue, in his breast; Sea-tossed where rocks on all sides fanged the shore.
He yields, and so, at last, does she, Weddah (who is absent on a foray) being kept in ignorance as long as possible by means of a 'special mission to some Arab chief of doubtful loyalty. 'This errand well fulfilled,
Into the camp full joyously he rode, Leading his weary escort; as for him, The love and trust that in his bosom glowed Had laughed away all weariness of limb. The sheikhs, his full report heard, all bestowed WeU-measured praises, brief and somewhat grim; As veterans scanning the enormous night In which this one star shone so bravely bright
Then Abd»el»Aziz rose and left the tent,
And he accompanied with eager pace;
And marked not how his frank smiles as he went
Were unreflected in each welWmown face;
How joyous greetings he on all sides sent
Brought hollow echoes as from caverned space:
His heart drank sweet wine *mid the roses singing, And thought the whole world with like revels nngmg.
He entered with his uncle, and his glance Sank disappointed. But the old man wept With passion o'er him, eyeing him askance; And made him eat and drink; and ever kept Questioning, questioning, as to every chance Throughout his absence; keen to intercept The fatal, But my cousin? ready strung Upon the tense lips by the eager tongue.
At length it flew, the lover's wingèd dart;
He sped it wreathed with flowers of hope and joy,
It pierced with iron point the old man's heart ..
This is, indeed, the realism of romanticism, and — it is undoubted poetry, too. And there are no lapses, either imaginative or verbal. There is nowhere an anticlimax. One glowing stanza simply leads on to another equally viyid, hearfcfelt and sturing. Where feeling and imagmation, interpenetrating each other, are carried along by a strong



current of rhythm, there is little danger that any reader will complain of tedium or coldness. Here is the realization of Weddah's feelings when at last he knows the truth:
This truth was as a potent poison>draught,
Fire in the entrails, wild fire in the brain,
Which kindled savage strength in him who quaffed
And did not die of its first maddening pain.
It struck him like the mere malignant shaft
Which stings a warrior into sense again,
Who lay benumbed with wounds, and would have died Unroused: the fresh wound makes him crawl and hide.
A month he wandered in wild solitude;
And in that month grew old, and yet grew strong:
Now lying prone and still as death would brood
The whole long day through and the whole night long;
Now demon'driven day and night pursued
Stark weariness amidst the clamorous throng
Of thoughts that raged with memory and desire, And parched, his bruised feet burning, could not ttre.
When he came back, o'ermastered by his vow To serve the Tribe through which he was unblest, None gazed without remorse upon his brow. None feit his glance without an aching breast: Magnificent in beauty even now, Ravaged by grief and fury and unrest,
He moved among them swift and stern of deed, And always silent save in action's need 
The Lion of the Azra is come back A meagre wolf! foes mocked, who mocked no more When midnight scared them with his fresh attack After the long day's fighting, and the war Found him for ever wolfdike, on their track As if consumed with slakeless thirst of gore:
Since he was cursed from slumber and repose, He wreaked his restlessness on friends and foes.
The lightnings of his keen sword ever flashed
Without a ray of lightning in his glance;
His blade where blades were thickest clove or clashed
Without a war*ery: ever in advance
He sought out death; but death as if abashed
Adopted for its own his sword and lance,
And rode his steed, and swayed aside or blunted
The eager hostile weapons he affronted.
(Part II, st 17—23).
When at last the war — observe that this entire episode is the poet's free invention — was over, and the Azra



fighters 'returned to heal its wounds, repair its waste, and thus grow strong and rich to fight again', Weddah disap» peared 
He set out in the night: none knew his goal. Though some might fix it in their secret thought He could no longer stifle or controi, In calm by battle's fever undistraught, The piteous yearning of his famished soul Which unappeasably its food besought;
Fretting his life out like an infant's cry,
Let us but see her once before we diel
(Part III, st 2).
Disguised as a merchant he entered 'Walid's city', which must be Damascus, and there a girl was 'attracted by his grave unsceptred majesty', Amine, Om«el*Bonain's favour* ite slave. Venturing all, he made himself known to her, and with the loyal girl's help got into the palace, where her mistress received him and hid him in a storeroom containing certain large chests, 'one of which they had made ready with most loving care'. Inside there was a deep soft couch, and for light and air some apertures had been cunningly made among the rich carvings. No one had noticed his entrance into Walid's palace, except an admirer of Amine's. His jealousy made him suspicious of the girl's designs, but with ready wit and tongue she managed to throw him off
the scent:
Of all her fellow^slaves it seemed but one, Whose breast was tinder for love's flame would she Vouchsafe a spark, had spied the venture run: Soho, my flirting madam, where is he You brought in here an hour since with your fun? A happy rogue, whoever he may be!
Have you already tired of this new dandy, Or hid him somewhere to be always handy?
The stupid jealous creature that you are!
Where were your eyes, then, not to know his face?
For weeks back he has dealt in our bazaar.
And now is on the road to some new place.
He had an emerald and diamond star
I thought might win my poor dear Lady's grace;
She would not even look at it alack!
I packed him off for ever with his pack.
Thus these longshapless lovers for awhile, Enringed with dreadful fire, safe ambush found, Screened by its very glare 
(Part Hl, st 19—21).



That the lovers were happy we well believe, but Thomson knows how to make us realize their happiness:
Like bird above its young one in the nest Which cannot fly, he often heard her singing; The thrill and swell of rapture from her breast, In fountains of delightful music springing: It seemed he had been borne among the biest, Whose quires around his darksome couch were ringing; Long after that celestial voice sank mute His heartstrings kept sweet tremble like a lute.
She heard his breathing like a muffled chime,
She heard his tranquil heart-beats through the flow
Of busy mcnials in the morning time;
Far couched at night she feit a sudden glow,
And straight her breathing answered rhyme for rhyme
His sof test furtive footsteps to and fro:
And none else heard? She marvelled how the sense Of living souls could be so dull and dense.
(ibid. st 26, 27).
And, strange to say, their bliss was shared by Walid himself:
She grew so lovely, ravishing, and sweet Her brow so radiant and her lips so warm; Such rich heart-music stirred her buoyant feet And swayed the gestures of her lithe young form, And revelled in her voice to bliss complete; That Walid whirled with his great passion's storm, Befooled with joy....
(ibid. st. 29).
Then Fate prepared the end'. Stendhal's anecdote tells nothing about the provenance of the pearl that caused the catastrophe. Thomson accounts for its appearance, enriching the tale at the same time with a fine touch of local colour3*):
_ A grey old man,
Bowed down with grief who had not bent with time,
Made way to Walid in the full divan:
His son, great<hearted and in youth's hot prime,
Was now a fugitive and under ban
For an indignant deed of sinless crime;
A noble heirloom pearl the suppliant brought To clear the clouded face ere he besought (Part. IV, st. 2).
vZbiïP1 ^ la-8t ,fae °f 016 8tanza (raoted compa« Marmaduke riCKtnalls observations in Oriental Encouniers (Chapter XXIII: Concern-



How the fateful pearl, once accepted, did its work, causing first the violent death of the saucy messenger who took it to the sultana, next Weddah's heroically mute descent into the grave, and lastly Om*eUBonain's speedy extinction, it is all set forth, with a poetic skill that only once seems to flag,*4) in the remaining stanzas of Part IV. Evidently the gentlemanly behaviour of the two Oriental rivals — the one in his röle of revenger, the other in that of silent victim ^— roused the enthusiasm of the Western author. Walid in possession of the key of the chest stifles an impulse to un* lock it, preferring to preserve the mystery 'that has been brought so perfectly within his own control.' Unseen Wed* dah in his chest, about to be interred alive,challenged by Walid, who bids him 'sink into nothingness and leave no tracé', as he leans upon the wood 'with face encircled by his hands', — lies 'as mute and still as death'.
Above there in her chamber Weddah might
Have leapt forth suddenly their foe to kïil.
Ev'n here with hazard of swift fight and flight
Escaped or perished as a warrior still;
But thus through him her name had suffered blight:
He locked his breath and nerves with rigid will 
Whether Matthew Arnold would have thought the above* given human entanglement a worthy subject for a poet to sing, is a point we may leave unsettled. Thomson, whose experiences in life had been much harsher than Arnold's, thought it was, and must occasionally have looked with satisfaction at what he had written, though in the following lines (taken from Part IV, st. 31), we may find the usual heart*searchings in which a true poet will indulge, when the work he has achieved does not fully embody the ideal he conceived:
M) It is when the discovery has taken place, and Weddah, bidding Om»el«Bonain farewell for ever, exhorts her to 'be proud and calm and strong':
What, weeping, thou, such kiss«unworthy tearsl
The glory of the Azra must not weep,
Whom mighty Weddah worships, for cold fears;
But only for strong love, in stillness deep 
It is the construction of the second and third lines that may especially be found fault with. But it is the only blemish of this kind in the whole poem. (125 stanzas in all; 'Isabella' has 63).



As surely as a very precious stone Finds out that jeweller who doth excel, So surely to the bard becometh known The tale which only he can fitly teil.
In our opinion the story could not have found a more competent poet to do justice to it, keeping it a story, en* larging its scope, enhancing its human appeal, and withal maintaining a high poetic level throughout a never*wearying succession of a hundred and twenty*five stanzas, all of them organic wholes, all of them carefully wrought, none of them containing lapses into bathos. Without any doubt, the worthy stone has found the right jeweller.
His language is as direct as any Arnoldian could but wish. Except for two instances which may have slipped out of his pen unawares — after all, he had been to school — he uses you and your instead of thou and thy. With very few inversions, it is elevated and yet makes the impression of speech, thanks to the absence of any archaizing tendency on the poet's part. The gnomic character of the lines just quoted about the jeweller would seem to account sufficiently for their very exceptional use of doth and becometh.
§ 3. Four years after the publication of Thomson's 'Vane's Story, Weddah and Om*el*Bonain, and Other Poems' (1881), Robert Bridges, then almost unknown, or, if known, ignored, published his 'Eros & Psyche', in several respects the very reverse of the poem we have just been considering.
According to the writer of a 'leader' in the 'Times Liter* ary Supplement' for May Ist, 1930, Bridges 'had chosen the theme because the thought of joy in beauty was already his deepest possession, and with it the thought that happiness is inseparable from faith; it was doubt, the claim to see and prove her lover, that caused all Psyche's tribulations. But Bridges wished not only to teil an enchanting story — 'love* liest vision far of all Olympus' faded hierarchy' — he wished its symbolic implications to be deeply pondered; and for this he relied upon a formal suggestion: he divided his poem into twelve books, the twelve months of the year, and gave each day of each month one stanza of narra* tive. In the 365th stanza, all troubles being ended, we hear of the birth of Psyche's daughter Hedone,
Whom in our noble English JOY we call. And honour them among us most of all, Whose happy children are as fair as she.



The year is out; but he has closed his cycle with the month of February, so there is room for a couplet to cele* brate Leap Year's twenty*ninth day; and this gives us the Envoy:
It is my prayer that she may smile on all, Who read my tale as she hath smiled on me.
The words could not be quieter, but he has grouped and fashioned his whole poem so as to give them their perfect weight.'
The writer of the T.L.S. article goes on to say that 'Work* manship as devoted to this brings with it its own peculiar inspiration', but we may be allowed to draw attention to the many insertions for which the poet's exceedingly artifi* cial scheme — which would be far more appropriate to the story of Demeter and Persephone — is responsible. Those insertions, being the work of a genuine poet, are never despicable, and often successful enough in themselves. Some* times they may even be considered improvements on the story, contributing to the willing suspension of unbelief, or enriching its imagery without impeding the march of events, as where (str. 24. November) Merimna and Lypè, care and sorrow, are described:
These, like twin sharks that in a fair ship's wake Swim constant, showing 'bove the water blue Their shearing fins, and hasty ravin make Of overthrow of offal, so these two On Aphrodite's passing follow hard 
Other instances may be cited, the ants that come to Psyche's aid (str. 2—5 of 'December'), Pan's intervention (str. 12—19) when Psyche contemplates suicide, etc. But they are a minority; the rest are, if the truth must be told, padding. We see no particular merit in the composition of a whole stanza (str. 28, 'March') with a string of sonorous proper names for only material:
Apseudès and Nemertès, Callianassa, Cymothoë, Thaleia, Limnorrhea, Clymenè, Ianeira and Ianassa, Do ris and Panopè and Galatea....
The description of the brazen giant Talos (str. 13 and 14 of 'April') with its weak ending 'such was this pest', is entirely gratuitous; so is the history of the ancient city of



Aptera (str. 1—5 of 'September'); so is much about Hephaestos and Aphrodite's car in 'November'. These and similar instances might even be adduced as proofs of the superiority of Apuleius' prose narrative, and, indeed, of prose narrative in general. To this may be added the exigencies of the stanzaic form — ababccb — which Bridges had chosen presumably for the sacred associations of the number seven, and which he failed to make his very own, except where' isolated cases prove the rule. Again and again we become aware that the form hampers his movements, as in the November' opening we have already referred to. Speakin* of Aphrodite's doves the poet says:
(Str. 2.)
These drew in turn her chariot, when in state
Along the heaven with all her train she fared;
And oft in journeying to the skiey gate
Of Zeus's palace high their flight had dared,
Which darkest vapour and thick glooms enshroud
Above all else in the perpetual cloud,
Wherethro' to mount again they stood prepared,
(Str. 3.)
Sleeking their feathers, by her shining car;
The same Hephaestos wrought for her, when he,
Bruised in his hideous fall from heaven afar.
Was nursed by Thetis, and Eurynomè,
The daughter of the ever«refluent main;
With whom he dwelt till he grew sound again 
Poetry of this description, surely, is dangerously near to mere twaddle, and is to any one fresh from the glowing energetic verse of 'Weddah and Om*el*Bonain' a great djaappointment. Bridges lacked Thomson's passion, and such a deficiency cannot be neutralized by aU the metrical skdl m the world. Nor can the author's scientific equipment when it makes him alight from his Pegasus in order to mount a professorial chair and start lectttring. The intro* duction of Newton's gravitation theory strikes us as an incongruity when the fate of Psyche's eldest sister, who has thrown herself down relying on Zephyr to break her falL is descnbed as follows:
(27)
But as a dead stone, from a height let fall, Silent and straight is gather'd by the force.



Of earth's vast mass upon its weight so small,
In speed increasing, as it nears its source
Of motion — by which law all things soe'er
Are clutch'd and dragg'd and held — so feil she there,
Like a dead stone, down in her headlong course.")
Incongruous, too, in our opinion, is an acrostic on the name of Purcell ('May', 15). On the other hand, the poem contains far better things. We may remark in passing on the skilfully managed rendering of Apollo's oracular verses:
(•April', 11) High on the topmost rock with funeral feast Convey and leave the maid, nor look to find A mortal husband, but a savage beast, The viperous scourge of gods and hu man kind; Who shames and vexes all, and as he flies With sword and fire, Zeus trembles in the skies, And groans arise from souls to heil consign'd.'6) ^--—r--,
More important, though never so rigorously subservient to the story as we find them in Thomson's poem, are the romantic bits of description Bridges provides; e.g. 'the snowy peak of that stormshapen pyramid', on whose top* most rock the footsore 'bridal procession' leave Psyche.
April (25)
And now the sun was sunk; only the peak Flash'd like a jewel in the deepening blue: And from the shade beneath none dared to speak, But aÜ look'd up, where glorified anew Psyche sat islanded in living day. Breathless they watcht her, till the last red ray Fled from her lifted arm that waved adieu.
»5) Compare: ' saltu se maximo praecipitem dedit Nee tarnen ad
illum locum, vel saltem mortua, pervenire potuit Nam per saxa eau* tium membris jactatis atque dissipatis, et perinde ut merebatur, laceratis visceribus suis, alitibus bestiisque obvium ferens pabulum, interiit (Met V).
s«) Montis in excelsi scopulo desiste puellam
Ornatam mundo funerei thalami: Nee speres generum mortali stirpe creatum,
Sed saevum atque ferum, vipereumque malum; Qui pinnis volitans super aethera, cuncta fatigat,
Flammaque et ferro singula debilitat: Quem tremit ipse Jovis: quo numina terrificantur:
Flumina quem horrescunt et stygiae tenebrae.



(26)
There left they her, turning with sad farewells To haste their homeward course, as best they might: But night was crowding up the harren fells, And hid full soon their rocky path from sight; And each unto his stumbling foot to hold His torch was fain, for o'er the moon was roll'd A mighty cloud from heaven, to blot her light
(27)
And thro' the darkness for long while was seen That armour'd train with waving fires to thread Downwards, by pass, defile, and black ravine, Each leading on the way that he was led. Slowly they gain'd the plain, and one by one Into the shadows of the woods were gone, Or in the clinging mists were quench'd and fled.
But observe that these stanzas, excellent though they are, do not, in the way that is essentially modern, compel us to view the landscape through the eyes of the heroine. If the 27th stanza is an exception, it is a half*hearted one. What more is there to be said? The marvellous element, being inherent in a myth, is frankly accepted, but detracts from the purely human appeal. Crudities, such as Psyche's spontaneous revenge on her sisters or the pusillanimous behaviour of the goddesses Hera and Demeter, are discarded or toned down. And thus the poem jogs on, 'in linked sweet* ness over*long drawn out'. The interest it rouses is of the mildest kind. Seldom, if ever, does it grip the reader.
There are those, however, who will construe into an ex* cellence what we consider a deficiency. We shall find them among the natures which resemble Bridges in being imagin* ative whilst lacking passion. They will be pleased and attracted by what is prettily sensuous and placidly rhythm* ïcal. They will be repelled by what is fulhblooded and turbulent.
§ 4. 'The Tale of Balen', by Algernon Charles Swinburne, (published in 1896), has been called a little epic. But in accordance with the views we expressed at the beginning of this chapter, we assign to it a place among undoubted romances. It has likewise been much overpraised, sometimes at the expense of Tennyson, Swinburne's rival, sometimes at that of his purveyor of subject*matter, Sir Thomas



Malory; and its undeserved fame has overshadowed or obscured the reputation of better poems.
Pace Vida Scudder (in her study on 'Le Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory & its Sources', 1917) we may safely affirm that the story of Balin (Balen), as given in the compilation referred to, is, from a literary point of view, one of the least interesting of the whole book, nay, that it is a failure and a chaotic jumble. And in versifying it Swinburne only made it worse. This is flying in the face of more than one distinguished critic, but we are confident we can prove our point, just as we think we have proved, against Paul de Reul (in the Xth volume of Neophilologus, 1925), that the baldness and exaggerated conciseness of Malory's story gives it a far more disconnected appearance than it originally had, but that the English compiler has pretty faithfully preserved its skeleton.
This skeleton follows here.
I. The Episode of the Damsel with the Sword. King Ryence of North Wales has invaded Arthur's territories at the head of a great army. Arthur calls a council of war at Camelot. Then a damsel presents herself, girded with a noble sword. On being questioned why she carries this weapon she states that it has been fastened to her by magie, and only a clean knight without villainy can undo the charm. All the knights present, Arthur included, having failed in the attempt, Balin le Savage tries his luck and succeeds, for which he is praised exceedingly by the damsel, who next begs him to return the sword to her. Balin refuses, and then she prophesies dire disaster for him. 'He shall slay with the sword the best friend he has.' Balin, nothing daunted, sends for his horse and his armour, and prepares to leave Arthur's court.
II. The Episode of the Lady of the Lake. She appears on horseback and requests Arthur to give her a present in return for Excalibur, the sword he obtained from her some time ago and of which he has forgotten the very name. The Lady demands the head of the knight who has just gained the sword, or otherwise that of the maiden who brought it. Arthur declines to gratify her in the way suggest* ed. And Balin recognizing the new arrival as his mother's murderess whom he has been seeking for three years, makes short work of the Lady of the Lake, and cuts off her head.



Arthur, passing wroth, banishes him from the court he is in the very act of leaving. Balin carries off the lady's head, unhindered, and entrusts it to his squire, whom he dis* patches to his friends in Northumberland. Meanwhile he will ride out alone and conquer, single*handed, Arthur's enemy, King Ryence, and thus regain the King's good graces. He is not downhearted in the least. "Where shall I meet with you?" asked the squire. "In King Arthur's court," said Balin.
III. The Episode of Launceor. Launceor, an Irish knight, asks Arthur's permission to ride after Balin and engage with hun in mortal combat. Arthur tells him to do his best and though Merlin foretells that Balin, like the valorous knight that he is, shall do unto the king great honour and tandness, Arthur never thinks of relenting, and he Iets Launceor ride to his doom. The Irish knight having been Killed, nis ladydove comes riding up, and seeing his 'dead corpse commits suicide with her lover's sword Balin sorrow*stricken, turns his head and espies his brother Balan' lhe two determine to go and attack King Ryence together and then King Marke of Cornwall appears upon the scené and gives orders for a splendid burial. Suddenly Merlin turns up. He refuses to teil his name, but he prophesies some unpleasant things to King Marke, and likewise to Balin, who, having lived at Arthur's court, must have known Merlin but never thinks of betraying his identity to the tang of Cornwall. Balin 'shall hurt the truest knight, and the man of most worship that now liveth, and through that stroke three kingdoms shall be in great poverty, misery and wretchedness twelve years, and the knight shall not be whole of that wound in many years.' Merlin disappears to reappear shortly afterwards, in disguise. But he is soon recognised and assists the brothers in their enterprise u \L T^Pis°de of the Defeat and Capture of Ryence. torty ot King Ryence's men are slain; the rest fly The tang, sorely wounded, surrenders, and is carried, on a horse* htter, to Camelot. Merlin, after some inevitable mysterious* ness, tells King Arthur what the two brothers have done tor him He also warns him that the next day Ryence's brother Nero will attack him.
V- The Episode of the Battle. Sir Kaye the Seneschal, isir Hervis de Revel, and King Arthur himself do 'passing



well', but Balin and his brother do 'marvellously', whilst Merlin with his tricks prevents King Lot of Orkney from joining Nero in time. Lot is killed in battle by King Pellinore. He is given a splendid tomb.
VI. The Episode of the Sorrowful Knight. A few days afterwards Arthur sees a weeping knight ride past his pavilion. His curiosity being aroused he sends Balin, who happens to be by, after the knight to fetch him back. Balin having given his word that no harm shall come to the stranger, the latter returns in his company, only to be smitten through the body with a spear, thrown by an in* visible hand. The dying knight discloses the name of his murderer: 'a traitorous knight called Garlon.' Balin makes a vow to avenge his death, and départs forthwith. He is accompanied by the murdered knight's damsel.
VII. The Episode of Perin de Mountbelyard. This knight, who accompanies Balin of his own accord, is in like manner murdered by Garlon.
VIII. The Episode of the Sick Chêtelaine. BaÜn's damsel is made to give up a certain quantity of her blood for the benefit of a sick Lady, at whose castle — although no cure had been effected by the blood — they are hospitably entertained afterwards.
IX. The Episode of the Knight with the Wounded Son. The two are lodged with a rich gentleman, whose son lies in a chair grievously complaining. He, too, has been wound* ed by Garlon, and nothing but his enemy's blood can restore him to health. Balin undertakes to bleed Garlon as required, and repairs to King Pellam's residence, where there is to be a great feast and where Balin cannot fail to find Garlon among the guests.
X. The Episode of Garlon and Pellam. At Pellam's dinner*table Balin is insulted by Garlon and retaliates by cleaving the wretch's head to the shoulders. Pellam, the most worshipful man that lived in those days (because he was of Joseph of Arimathy's kin), behaves like a benighted heathen, and having caught a grim weapon strikes eagerly at Balin. The knight with the two swords loses the one, and forgets he carries the other. Or perhaps he remembers that this other sword must serve him afterwards to kill his dearest friend. At any rate he does not use it against his enemy, and being pursued by Pellam he runs from room to



room looking for a weapon. At last, in a 'chamber that is marvellously well dight and richly', he finds a spear, strangely wrought'. Seizing this spear Balin turns upon his pursuer, smiting him passingly sore. As soon as Pellam falls to earth the whole castle collapses. After three days Merlin comes, extricates BaUn from the ruins where his damsel and his horse lie dead, and mounts him upon another hor se. Then Balin départs from Merlin, and, for once assuming the prophet's mantle himself, says to the seer: 'In this world we shall never meet more.'
XI. The Episode of Garnish of the Mount. Laden with the curses of such of the inhabitants as are still alive, Bahn rides through King Pellam's three countries, which because of Balin's most dolorous stroke are destroyed. Several days after crossing the boundary he happens upon yet another weeping knight, whose ladydove has failed him at the trysting*place. Together they ride to the lady's castle, there to discover that the faithless damsel is keeping another appointment. Garnish, his nose bleeding because of his agitation, smites off both the heads of the sleeping lovers, after which he makes great moan and, with bitter reproaches at Balin, kills himself by falling on his sword.
XII. The Episode of the Castle. Balin reaches a gilt* lettered cross, telling him not to ride towards a certain castle, 'being a knight alone'. He is likewise warned off by an old, hoary gentleman (Merlin?), but he hears a horn blow, and immediately his mettle is roused. He rides towards the castle, is joyfully received by a hundred ladies and many knights, and after being entertained with dancing and minstrelsy he is ordered by the chief lady of the castle to joust with a knight that keepeth an island. Such is the time*honoured custom of the place. Bahn, though inveighing bitterly against it, consents to fight, and accepts from one of the knights a shield alleged to be bigger and more reliable than his own, only to be told on reaching the island that he should not have done so.
XIII. The Episode of the Combat, the Mutual Recogt nition of the Combatants, and their Deaths. Balan comes riding up, accoutred in red, on a horse with red trappings. His brother's shield prevents recognition and a terrible fight ensues. At last Balan sinks down for weariness. And now Balin asks him what his name is. On hearing the



dreadful news he falls back in a swoon. Then Balan goes on all fours, 'feet and hands', and takes off his brother's heimet. After receiving the sacrament they die, all the ladies and gentlewomen weeping for pity. Then they are buried, and the Lady orders Balan's name and fate to be inscribed upon the tomb. Batin's name was unknown to her.
XIV. The End. Merlin, who appears 'on the morrow', supplies the name that is missing. After the inevitable pro* phecies, which show him in a very disagreeable light, — Merlin tells with a laugh how with Balin's fateful sword Launcelot shall kill his best friend, viz. Sir Gawaine, — the wizard returns to Camelot to inform King Arthur. 'Thus endeth the tale of Balin and Balan, two brethren, born in Northumberland, good knights.'
In Malory's book the brothers are Catholics, but in spite of sacrament, extreme unction, and Joseph of Arimathy, the story appears to be heathen throughout, and a marvel* lous farrago of the most heterogeneous moiifs, defying all attempts at interpretation, whether psychological, anthro* pological, or symbolical.37) What induced Swinburne to take up this unpromising material, and what did he make of it?
As regards the first of these questions, the answer immediately suggesting itself will be that it was for the greater part a feeling of rivalry, with which some strong
37) The following seven motifs (there are more) are either wide-spread (so as practically to belong to the domain of folk'lore) or are easily matched from saga, tale, or epic.
1. The freeing of a sword. (Cf. the Volsunga saga, with Sigmund taking possession of a sword which Odin had stuck into a tree). The motif occurs also in Malory I, 3, where we are told how Arthur himself pulled a sword out of a stone, nobody else having been able to dislodge it.
2. The head of the hero asked as a boon, which boon has been inadvert» ently granted beforehand. (Herod and Salome).
3. The invisible slayer. (Apollo in his wrath, in the first book of the Iliad).
4. Blood as a medicine. (Hartmann von Aue, Der Arme Heinrich).
5. A kingdom suffering because its ruler has been grievously wounded. (Frazer, The Golden Bough, passim).
6. A false lady discovered sleeping in the arms of a paramour of repellent aspect ('Arabian Nights').
7. 'The custom of the castle', the victor succeeding to the position of the man he has slain, with the inevitable prospect of being killed in like fashion himself. (The Priest of Nemi, etc. etc.)



'local patriotism' was inextricably bound up. In Tennyson's last Arthurian 'idyll' Balin and Balan, which had appeared in 1885, the Laureate had made exceedingly free with the subject matter supplied by Malory, refashioning Balin's story in a high*handed way. It is true that in so doing he had produced something far more consistent than Malory's straggling and selfscontradictory account. It is true that he had but availed himself of the prerogative which such story*tellers as are not content to be slavish repeaters or copyists have claimed even before the art of letters began. It is also true that originally Swinburne was not of those to whom a tale once handed down in a certain shape is absolutely sacrosanct, since he had himself done a consider* able deal of 'tinkering' at the raw material of his 'Atalanta'. But Tennyson had obtained his effects thanks to a 'Victori* an' preoccupation with ethics. Besides, he had been unfair to the character of his Northumbrian knight. Two grievous faults. For Swinburne had always been, with Rossetti and William Morris, in open revolt against Tennysonian Victori* anism. And being of Northumbrian stock, and proud of the fact, he bitterly resented the 'injustice' done by the Laureate to the North Country in depicting Balin as 'violent'.
Surely, such an aspersion had to be refuted, and the obvious course open to Swinburne was to tackle the same material from his own point of view. And just as William Morris had chosen the spelling 'Guenevere' whereas Tenny* son had used 'Guinevere', Swinburne undertook to write the story of Balen, because Tennyson had called the Northern hero Balin. Philological reasons for this choice cannot be given. Malory uses the two forms, Balen and Balyn, about equally often. And for Tennyson's higkhanded refashioning of the old story Swinburne substituted slavish adherence to it. He took over every absurdity and incongruity. But he could not help adding some of his own invention. We subjoin two:
In what we called 'The Episode of Launceor' the Irish knight overtakes Balen a few hours after the latter's depart» ure from court. In Swinburne's poem (IV, 4) it must have taken Launceor months, for we read (our i talies):
Dawn on a golden moorland side By holt and heath saw Balen ride And Launceor after, pricked with pride



And stung with spurring envy: wide
And far he had riddert athwart strange lands
And sought amiss the man he found
And cried on, till the stormy sound
Rang as a rallying trumpet round That fires men's hearts and hands.
Of course, accoutred as a mediaeval knight was it must have been impossible for him to go, on horseback, far and wide and through strange lands in less than, say, a few months. It may be conceded that the point is relatively unimportant, but the absurdity is in Launceor's continual bawling, which reminds one of Puck misleading Lysander and Demetrius rather than of a rallying trumpet round that fires men's hearts and hands, whatever we may think of the general aptness or — superfluity of the words in the last line of verse.
Then, in the same 'Episode', after the lady has committed suicide on finding her lover slain, Balen rides away sorrow* stricken (IV, 13).
And sorrowing for their strange love's sake Rode Balen forth by lawn and lake, By moor and moss and briar and brake And in his heart their sorrow spake....
Then toward a sunbright wildwood side He looked and saw beneath it ride A knight whose arms afar espied By note of name and proof of pride
Bare witness of his brother born, His brother Balan....
By that time the hero must have been far from the two dead bodies. But after Balin and Balan have, 'each with each taken counsel meet for comfort', and are about to ride on together, there comes (IV, 19):
A creature withered as with flame, A dwarf mismade in nature's shame, Between them and the sun.
If the last line is to be taken at its face value, the sun must have been very low in the sky, a thing which is not borne out by the rest of the canto. But this point is entirely negligible in comparison with what follows. For we are told that this dwarf (IV, 20) 'riding fleet as fire may glide' (our italics)



....found the dead He side by side, And wailed and rent his hair and cried, 'Who hath done this deed?' and Balen eyed
The strange thing loathfully, and said, 'The knight I slew, who found him fain And keen to slay me.... &c'
This whole episode as told by Malory is irrelevant But as handled by Swinburne it has become utter nonsense. There is, however, much more nonsense in the poem. Again and again the poet sins against the laws of imaginative logic. He speaks of swords that close webs:
.... God bids not thee believe
Truth, and the web thy life must weave
For even this sword to close and cleave
Hangs heavy round my heart (JJ, 21).
He causes death to listen hungrily for the last sigh that Üfe or death might hear from dying men:
the evil tune
Of battle unnatural made again Mad music as for death's wide ear Listening and hungering toward the near Last sigh that life or death might hear
At last from dying men. (VII, 42).
He compares a weary rider who has fallen with his horse to a rain=bruised reed:
But Balen by his falling steed Was bruised the sorer, being indeed Wayiweary, like a raimbruised reed
With travel ere he fought. (VII, 41).
It takes him a complete stanza to 'convey' to the reader the rather simple truth: that in autumn, when air and sea are full of the joy of living, their thankfulness (or joy) fills sea and land with life:
In autumn, when the wind and sea Rejoice to live and laugh to. be, And scarce the blast that curbs the tree And bids before it quail and flee
The fiery foliage, where its brand Is radiant as the seal of spring. Sounds less dehght and waves a wing Less lustrous, life's loud thanksgiving
Puts life in sea and land. (VI, 1).



Another constant feature of the poem are antüclimaxes:
.while they breathed, his eye
Glanced up, and saw beneath the sky
Sights fairer than the sun. The towers of all the castle there Stood full of ladies, blithe and fair As the earth beneath and the amorous air About them and above them were.
(VII, 44, 45).
So the ladies, who at first are fairer than the sun, are the next moment only just as fair as the earth about them, and the air — not the sky, observe, but the air! — above them.
The fact was that Swinburne was not equal to a self* imposed task that was two*fold. On the one hand he wanted to be absolutely faithful to the old story as given by much* revered Malory, on the other he had chosen to teil it in a difficult stanzaic form. In either case he wanted to rival and surpass Tennyson, from whom he had borrowed the stanza of 'The Lady of Shalott'. He did not apparently realize that the latter poem, one of Tennyson's undisputed master*pieces, contains only nineteen stanzas, all told; that the subject*matter is of the simplest, slightest, and most 'malleable'; and that the symbolism in it — and even the steadily recurring rimes 'Camelot' and 'Shalott', only twice interrupted by 'Lancelot', have their symbolic meaning and effect — far outweighs its narrative. 'The Tale of Balen' runs to a great length, consisting of no fewer than two hundred and fiffy*three stanzas, and the verse*pattern taxed Swinburne's riming*powers to the utmost. The inevitable result was 'Malory and water'. It is true that the water mostly pretends to be headier stuff. But the reader may compare the following passages taken from Malory's Cap. XI. (page 88 Sommer's edition) and corresponding to 'The Tale of Balen', VI 2—8.
Malory:
O where is Balen & Balan & Pellinore saide kynge Arthur / as for Pellinore sayd Merlyn / he wyl mete with yow soone/And as for Balyn he wille not be long from yowlbut the other broder wil departe ye shalle see hym no more/.



Swinburne:
"O where are they whose hands upbore My battle," Arthur said, "before The wild Welsh host's wide rage and roar? Balen and Balan, Pellinore,
Where are they?" Merlin answered him: "Balen shall be not long away From sight of you, but night nor day Shall bring his brother back to say
If life burn bright or dim."
Malory:
By my feyth said Arthur they are two merveyllous knyghtes I and namely Balyn passeth of prowesse of ony knyghte that ever I found I for moche beholden I ani vnto hym / wold god he wold abyde with me I
Swinburne:
'Now, by my faith,' said Arthur then, Two marvellous knights are they, whose ken Toward battle makes the twain as ten, And Balen most of all born men
Passeth of prowess all I know Or ever found or sought to see: Would God he would abide with me To face the timcs foretold of thee
And all the latter woe.
Malory:
After this Merlyn told vnto kynge Arthur of the prophe*
eye, that there shold be a grete batail besyde Salysbury 
Wythin a day or two kynge Arthur was somewhat seke/and he lete pytche his pauelione in a medowe/Sc there he leyd hym doune on a paylet to slepe / but he myght haue no rest I
Swinburne:
For there had Merlin shown the king The doom that songs unborn should sing, The gifts that time should rise and bring Of blithe and bitter days to spring
As weeds and flowers against the sun. And on the king for fear's sake feil Sickness, and sorrow deep as heil, Nor even might sleep bid fear farewell
If grace to sleep were won.
Down in a meadow green and still He bade the folk that wrought his will Pitch his pavttton, where the chili Soft night would let not rest fulfil
Hls heart wherein dark fears lay deep.



Malory:
Right so he herd a grere noyse of an hors and therwith the kynge loked oute at the porche of the pauelione and sawe a knight comynge even by hym makyng grere dole Abyde fair syr said Arthur / & telle me wherfor thow makest this sorowel ye maye lytel amend me said the knighte and soo passed forthe to the castel of Melyot I Anone after ther came balen I
Swinburne:
And sharp against his hearing cast -Came a sound as of hotsehoofs fast Passing, that ere their sound were past Aroused him as from sleep.
And forth he looked along the grass And saw before his portal pass A knight that wailed aloud, "Alas That life should find this dolorous pass
And find no shield from doom and doleV And hearing all his moan, "Abide, Fair sir," the king arose and cried, "And say what sorrow bids you ride
So sorrowful of soul."
"My hurt may no man heal, God wot. And help of man may speed me not," The sad knight said, "nor change my lot" And toward the castle of Melyot,
Whose towers arose a league away He passed forth sorrowing: and anon. Ere well the woful sight were gone, Came Balen down the meads that shone Strong, bright, and brave as day.
The above given quotations will, we trust, give any reader a fair idea of Swinburne's method in adapting Malory to his poetic ends. He attempts no 'psychologische vertiefung'; for the matter of that, it would tax the mental resources of a Shakespeare to attempt such a thing with for only material the story just as the 'Morte D'Arthur' gives it. Swinburne sticks to the bare facts — and the words! — of his original, eking out the bald story by means of much talk about life and death, darkness and fate; by means of nature*symbolism — most of it unsuccessful; and the inser* tion of quantities of irrelevant matter, merely to obtain riming lines and to fill out his stanzas. The story was un*



satisfactory, he has made it worse. Another point worth insisting on, in view of his high reputation as a 'melodist', is the fact that in the 'Tale of Balen' Swinburne is so often guilty of cacophony, as anyone gifted with an ear can verify by reading the poem aloud. The explanation is: that his equipment as a writer of verse was chiefly of the 'motorial' kind, not of the 'acoustic'. Into the details of the matter it is impossible for us to enter now; we must be content to draw the reader's attention to the last stanza we quoted, and to its plenitude of meaningless o's — meaningless as far as vowel*music is concerned. We find four rimes with ot, three with on, and in the body of the stanza the words sorrowing and strong occupying 'ear*striking' positions. It will be difficult if not impossible to match such a stanza from the works of any of the other great Victorians.
§5. Robert Calverley Trevelyan is not a poet whose name conveys much to the Continental reader. Nor is this wonderful. What else is to be expected by a writer of verse* dramas that have never been publicly acted, and of librettos that have never found composers, or — in the rare instance that they were really set to music, — never been performed? But he also wrote a pleasant 'romance' in verse which deserves its place in this chapter. It is called 'The Foolishness of Solomon', and was published in 1915.
Its story is partly based on an ancient Talmudic legend, which has been retold more than once, and which we our* selves found in a German collection of Jewish traditions compiled by Wolf Paschebs (Prague, 1883) under the title Sippurim. It tells how Aschmadai or Asmodai, the well* known powerful demon, gets into the power of King Solo* mon, thanks to the intrepid resourcefulness of Benajahu (or Benaiah ben Jehoiada), the captain of the royal guard, who — in a dark and frightful ca ver n — drained the demon's water*jar of its brackish contents, replenishing it with fra* grant wine that was both sweet and heady. The demon gets intoxicated and caught, and is now condemned to sweat and grunt in the service of the great temple*builder. But at last Asmodai sees and seizes his opportunity, hurls Solo* mon out of his palace into empty space, and now plays at being king of the Jews himself, to the great distress of his 'subjects'.
Here the poet has seen, and seized, his opportunity to



tilt at a time?honoured reputation. Was this king Solomon really as wise as the vox populi has always cracked him up to be? In Trevelyan's opinion he was not, and so he pro* ceeded, in satiric verse whose bland urbanity (though not its technique) reminds one of Dryden's 'Absalom and Achi* tophel', to prepossess us against this royal worcUmonger, whose uxoriousness far exceeded his wisdom:
It was the month Bul of his reign's twelfth year.
Already through all kingdoms far and near
The rumour of his glory had gone forth.
Of his might, wisdom, justice, wealth and worth.
At length complete the Temple testified
To its builder's sumptuous piety, and his pride.
Yet large and generous, nor to be confined
To one sole jealous worship was his mind.
This the stern elders of good David's reign
Viewing with grave surprise and righteous pain,
Would oft wag ancient beards and murmuring nod,
Because less perfect with the Lord his God
Was the son's than the father's heart had been.
For first to gratify his bestdoved queen,
The Pharaoh Shishak's daughter, at her prayer
(Who could deny a suppliant so fair?
Not Solomon!) within the pleasureshouse
Which he had built for dalliance with his spouse,
He bade construct a little private shrine
To Theban Ammon, and that Buil divine,
Memphian Apis, and around the cell
Fair chambers, where their white»robed priests might dweil,
An alien troupe, with shaven crown and chin,
Oh scandal! Nor yet ended there his sin.
From Rabba with another gentle bride
Came Milcom, the Ammonite infanticide.
To Chemosh next, of deities most obscene,
Moab's abomination, to the Queen
Of Heaven, moon»crowned Sidonian Ashtoreth,
Who for her lover Thammuz' wound and death
Laments with annual passion each new Spring,
To all these and many more the uxorious king
Built altars and high>places, groves and shrines;
Nor was there one of all his concubines,
Even the meanest and the least esteemed,
Who might not, in such privacy as beseemed,
Freely adore the gods of her own land.
Largeness of heart, yea even as the sand
That is on the sea»shore, was Solomon's.
Obviously this sham sage, this mere pretender, required a suitable foil; but no such foil being provided by the origi*



nal story, Trevelyan invented one himself, in the person of Mu Wang, a Chinese emperor, who, in search of wisdom, left his palace and his capital in order to wander from coun* try to country. This Mu Wang is present when, beneath the Porch of Judgement, King Solomon is entertaining his fair visitor, Balkis of Sheba, to a display of his 'wisdom' and state*craft.
Behind the press, unnoticed and apart,
A venerable old man had stood some while
Leaning upon his staff. A weary smile
Over his sun*tanned face would come and go,
Responding to the ceaseless ebb and flow
Of knowledge, ignorance, wisdom and wise folly,
A kindly smile and shrewd, yet melancholy.
Outlandish were his features, high cheek>bones,
Eyes long and narrow, dark like sardian stones.
His scanty beard in whitening wisps strayed down
Over his threadbare, travekfaded gown.
He seemed one born 'neath farsoff unknown skies:
Yet in his calm demeanour and strange eyes,
And in the large composure of his face,
A gentle majesty, a pensive grace
Told of a mind harmonized and made free....
After all questioners and disputants had withdrawn, some satisfied, others discomfited, Solomon prepared to conduct the queen 'where alone they might converse at leisure', when Mu Wang advanced to the lowest step of the throne
like one
Requesting audience. Whereat Solomon Though inwardly at such delay he fumed, Yet with a patiënt sigh his throne resumed, And signed to him to speak '
Solomon marvelled at the stranger's words. What business had this seedydooking wayfarer to state in a king's presence that it seems hard to be a king — and wise, and to ask if Solomon would, please, teach him 'wherein the true Happi* ness of a king must be found'? However, bold though the question was, it concerned a theme that 'well became Solo* mon's royalty to adorn'. And so the king starts word*mon# gering again, answering the stranger in the style of Chapter XXX of the Book of Proverbs. This is a satirical touch, since the chapter in question has never been attributed to king Solomon, but to Agur the son of Jakeh.



'There be three things which few of women born May know or share, yet which none may despise, Yea four noble and glorious beyond price: The rapt soul of the minstrel when on wings Of music and song lifted it upsprings; His calm bliss to whom wisdom like a bride New«wed un veils her beauty and her pride; The tranced seer's dream brooding beyond things seen. And the glad heart of a great king, or queen,' (Here towards Balkis courteously he bowed. Again with a quick blush her fair cheek glowed.) The glad heart of a strong king in that hour When. first he knoweth that against his power There is no rising up, since far and near Upon all nations round hath faüen the fear Of his horsemen and chariots, when in wrath To chastise and destroy he goeth forth. Nor in his might rejoiceth he alone....'
Solomon remembers in time to throw a sop to Cerberus; i.e. to treat his very plebeian collocutor to some very high* min de d sentiments:
'On Justice founded are his house and throne, Stablished in Peace, in Righteousness made sure. In the welfare alike of rich and poor Lies his sole welfare, and in their content The end and glory of his government '
And then he goes on to panegyrize Wisdom:
....'of Happiness the flower: From her proceeds all glory, wealth and power; By her kings reign; their treasures she doth fill, Crowning their days with fame most durable. More precious is her fruit than most fine gold, Her revenue than choice silver. She of old, While yet earth was not, with God did abide, Enthroned from everlasting by His side. When He prepared the Heavens, she was there; And when the depths were stablished, and the air Spread out above them, when the mountains first Were moulded, and from dust lo forth life burst, Then as one brought up with Him, she was by.' He ceased, and gazed like one in ecstasy, Whose spirit has flown beyond the bounds of sense, So dumb awhile needs must he bide, till thence Wheresoever it be wandering, his soul Wing back, like a tired wikkbee to its hole.'
And Mu Wang sighs to see him selMntoxicated with his own words, but some plain speaking on the wayfarer's



part merely gets him thrown into prisoü, there for a while, at Solomon's expense, 'to fare
Upon the food of knaves and fools who dare Lift up their voice in blasphemous slanderings Against the estate and majesty of kings'.
Now a new motif is introduced, viz. the 'Prolog im Himmel' to the Book of Job. Asmodai is the Adversary here, and he reviles God's favourite, King Solomon, who, according to him, has found the art to seem righteous, just and wise, without being so.
This moment is so very important that the poet feels it ought to be given some permanence. So there follows a simile: after Asmodai ends, murmuring rage swells forth from the vast assembled multitudes of angels
'as when tall woods Suddenly tempest«writhen heave and moan, Till all their eddying tops in one fierce tone Are howling'.
Abdiel, enflamed with righteous zeal, calls Asmodai a spirit 'accurst, impious and unleal' for presuming to im* peach the wisdom and integrity of a monarch whom Yahveh himself has proclaimed perfect 'in thought, deed and word'. Asmodai retorts that he is not a har, but that evidently the other celestials take no delight in hearing the truth, and he professes himself both eager and able to make good all his seemingly impious words, if Adonai will grant him only 'forty nights and days'.
'If then King Solomon within that space, Before his court and people throned on high Hath not made full confession publicly, That neither is he righteous, wise nor just Beyond the common lot of human dust, And that his knowledge, even as other men's, Is nought else but imposture and pretence, Then without murmuring will I endure Forever to renounce these calm and pure Empyreal courts, where privileged by thy grace, Oft to behold the glory of thy face, Many an hour with pro fit have I spent In grave debate and subtle argument With angel disputants....'
Yahveh accepts the challenge and Asmodai loses no time in making his way to the royal palace in Jerusalem. Assum*



ing the shape of Balkis the Queen and pretending to kiss Solomon, he robs the monarch of his famous ring with the talismanic emerald. The king recognizes the terrible features of his demon foe only when it is too late, and this very brief instant, too, receives the prolongation of a very apt simile:
'Thus a doe,
Led by thirst to the reetUfringed banks of Nile,
Sees not the nostrils of a crocodile
Lurking beside the brink — sees not, or deerns
A floating log; till stooping toward the stream's
Smooth surface, glistening like a lake of pearl,
Lo on a sudden, in a fierce turbulent swirl
Her mirrored image vanishes, and instead
Gapes the fanged horror of that monstrous head.'
Solomon loses consciousness, to be waked up some time afterwards by crawling vermin, raucous snores, and a steadily falling roof*drip. He is in the dungeon where he had ordered Mu Wang to be cast. Asmodai has effected a transfer of souls between the king and the Chinese way* farer; between the man who is wise in his own conceit and the humble seeker for wisdom. Likewise, the demon causes Solomon to be present when his former body, now occupied by Mu Wang, mounts upon the throne in the Pórch of Judgement, to sit there side by side with Balkis, whose seductive loveliness, however, he does not seem to notice. Solomon is af raid and ashamed. Since it is possible for him to explore the stranger's memories, it follows that Mu Wang inversely, has access to king Solomon's disreputable past. Somewhat, indeed, he is consoled to discover that even Chinese philosophers are human, and that 'some thorn lurks even in the saintliest flesh'. But he is sorely troubled by what he hears in prison about himself from his compan* ions in misfortune, to whom, as it comes home to him that instead of being a great wise king he has merely been a vainglorious, hypocritical tyrant, he reviles Solomon in no measured terms, calling him — much to their amaze* ment — a fooi, whereas they simply thought him wicked. And meanwhile Balkis is astonished to find, as she con* verses with 'King Solomon', gentle scepticism instead of grandiloquent self*assertion, and a benevolence which fetches the bold alien disputant of a while ago from his prison to make him feast at the royal table.



Radiantly the eyes of Balkis shone,
Whene'er the stranger sage and the wise king,
Prompted by her ingenious questioning,
Would reveal to her ears in subtle speech
The wisdom hidden within the hearts of each.
'These two,' she thought, 'of all men now on earth
Must be the wisest, and their words most worth
Laying to heart, and copying, as I do,
On tabiets night by night. Yet of the two
Solomon is the wisest to my mind.'
These thoughts of hers were easily divined
By the true Solomon; nor could he quite
Refrain sometimes from making, in despite
His new>found wisdom, the old stale parade
Of puerile Scholastic rhodomontade,
Erudite pedantry and omniscience.
But now the full stream of his eloquence
Was each time checked by a stiUWoiced reproof,
As though deep in his soul there dwelt aloof
Some other wiser soul, severe yet kind,
Watchful ever to wam and to remind.
Then haply meeting the king's gaze, he winced
Before the smile of his own eyes, convinced
Of folly; and thus abashed would remain mum;
While Balkis wondered why his lips grew dumb
In rhetoric's midsflight.
But Asmodai is delighted to see the alteration that is being wrought in Solomon's soul, and at last, when he thinks the auspicious hour has come, he restores the trans* ferred souls to their original bodies. The hour comes when Balkis, obliged to return to her own country, bids a tearful adieu to the king who, she says, has taught her so much, especially the vanity of 'eloquence', and whose wisdom far exceeds his fame. She praises everyone happy that stands before the throne of such a king, and she glorifies Yahveh his God, who delighted in him and set him on the throne of Israël.
But Solomon sat rigid as a stone, Staring before him with unconscious gaze Void of all speculation.
The audience waited in amazement: they did not know that Asmodai was at his spells again. But when at last the soul of Israel's king had been restored to its proper body, Solomon jumped up 'and with wild eyes stared around'.
11



In consternation his grave counsellors frowned,
Concerned to see their master's royal guest
By such insane discourtesy distressed.
But soon, recovering lost selfcmastery,
Calmly he spoke: 'Nay, Balkis, who am I
That thou shouldst flatter and belaud me so?
Surely ironie is thy praise, as though,
Because intrigue and chance of birth had made me
A king's heir, and in wealth and glory arrayed me,
Therefore no less in royalty of mind
I must excel....'
Solomon disclaims all wisdom, since real wisdom is not ambitious either to refute or teach but, abiding in silence, is content to learn:
'Such Wisdom, nourished and controlled by awe,
Solomon's was not, but a vain pretence
Thereof, a shadow to cheat ignorance.
But now, awakened from vainglorious dreams,
He sees and knows himself, not as he seems.
Henceforth, purged by self«knowledge from pride's sin,
True Wisdom's quest may Solomon begin.'
Asmodai triumphs, free from the power of the ring, per* manently free of the precincts of heaven. As for Mu Wang, he vanishes and we hear no more of him or his quest It is a well*constructed story, told with spirit, swing and colour, but somewhat careless here and there in its versification. Besides, the diversity of metre in the third canto, in which we even see the spirit of Hudibras flitting for a moment,88) is not quite satisfactory. But as as narrative poem it is an achievement.
38) Compare (p. 37) the 'horde of predatory boys' disturbing an ants' nest:
Ploughing up all the hard*earned fruits Of toilsome months with sticks and boots.



CHAPTER VIII.
Tennyson, and the Encroachments of Lyricism.
§ 1. Our days have seen Tennyson fallen from his former éminence. In literary circles his Lady Clares and Lords of Burleigh awaken nothing but scorn; Enoch Arden, the delight of our grandmothers, is dismissed with a shrug; and people who never yet found courage enough to read through the whole of the Tdylls of the King' have complained of their shoddy sentiment and false morality. Besides he has been charged with inability to draw a medieval knight as he really was. With none of these things are we much concerned here.
Whether he held any theory concerning the task of a story*teller is unknown. He never wrote a literary pros gramme, he never formulated poetical principles that reached the reading public, he does not seem'to have ex* pressed himself on the subject in conversation. Yet he wrote stories in verse, and oftener poems which, for the want of a better term, we may call stories. It should be possible to find out the principles to which these narratives and semi*narratives conform, and the aesthetic ideal that was at the back of the poet's mind when he wrote them.
It has been maintained that the career of Tennyson, who came even less inta contact with the rude outer world than his predecessor Wordsworth himself, was an ideal poetical career; and there is some measure of truth in the statement — it is Stedman's — provided the term poet is qualified by the adjective lyrical. For it would appear from the careers of such men as Morris and Horne, as Chaucer, Camoens, Goethe, even Milton, (who it is often forgotten, was for years and years anything but a learned recluse), that for a narrative poet to be truly successful he must have been a man of action, or at any rate have mixed much with the world. Tennyson — poet in the Millian sense — played no «ctive part in the world of men. He held communings with his own soul. He brooded. He was the male counterpart of his own 'Lady of Shalott', except that, being of tougher fibre, he did not die till he was about eighty*three years old.
We must, of course, be careful to distinguish brooding



from hard thinking. In the latter case there is an intellec* tual problem of which we endeavour to find the solution. In the former there are certain, more or less disagreeable or perplexing, aspects of life, to which, with a kind of perversity, our mind returns again and again, and on which it loves to dweil, familiarizing itself with them from every possible angle; a kind of moody rêverie which, after making some seeming progress, really gets us nowhere, save for countless ever*repeated landings near our original starting* point. We return to the things that perplex us, both for the sake of the train of rêverie started by them and for the moods by which these are attended. With these moods, in fact, the habitual brooder has come to be in love, so to say. But inversely — Coleridge's often quoted line 'we receive but what we give' conveys only a half*truth — there are certain places, surroundings, regions which, thanks partly, to peculiar features in the landscape, thanks partly, to pre* valent atmospheric conditions, induce the brooding habit more than others. Such a region is presented by 'the great open spaces of the Lincolnshire fen*country, with their breadth of sky and far*stretching solitude, which is almost desolation, and their gleaming watercourses fretting every* where, like silver threads, the waste of green'. (Dawson, 'Makers of Modern English', p. 171). Tennyson, predisposed by nature to be a brooder, was made a confirmed one by those plains, 'grassy, wild, and bare', by that atmosphere, 'building up underroofs of doleful grey', under which the weary wind went on, 'taking the reedtops as it went'. There have been other brooders. Thomson of the City of Dreadful Night was one. But Thomson could forget himself in telling a tale, Tennyson could not. His 'In Memoriam' corresponds to the City aforementioned. But for the other's 'Weddah and Om*el*Bonain' he has little if anything to show, except — with the necessary restrictions — 'the Princess' and 'Enoch Arden'. Not the 'Idylls of the King' at any rate.
Now when a habit of brooding is joined to the possession of sufficiënt power of utterance, we expect lyricism as the appropriate outcome; and in this connection we had better distinguish two kinds of lyricism, the one direct, being simply a song*like outpouring of the heart, whether 'sing* able' or not, the other indirect, pseudo*narrative, mytho* poeic or myth*making. The word myth as we understand it



here rather differs in meaning from certain acceptations of it in modern parlance. We may speak of the Napoleonic myth to indicate the emotional and rather fantastic shape which — as distinct from sober history — Bonaparte and his doings have assumed in the minds of successive genera* tions of Western Europeans. We may sometimes, in an uncharitable mood, affirm of some philanthropist that his benevolence is a myth, as being contrary to fact. We may speak of the remarkable way in which, according to Vachel Lindsay, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' has furnished the mind of the North American negro with a kind of mythology, repre* senting Simon Legree and Uncle Tom as antagonists of the Ahriman and Ormuzd type, and Eva St. Clair as something like the Virgin Mary. Not even the lasfcmentioned kind corresponds to our present conception of the term, which is: an ostensible story, mostly of the 'marvellous kind', em* bodying some truth with a strong human appeal, a truth which may be vaguely apprehended, but which is too ob* scure for immediate, abstract, formulation, or which, being feit as some sort of problem defying intellectual solution, is apparently solved by the 'poetical' method of dressing it out symbohcally. Of such nature is Plato's myth of the chariot of the soul with its charioteer and its two winged horses ('Phaedrus' 25). And such a myth is 'The Lady of Shalott'.
It is easy to distinguish those myths from their apparent relations, parables. The essential thing about a parable is: the possession of some ethical content couched in unvar* nished, even homely, language, the story being reduced to its quite indispensable elements, and really solving its problem, because throwing unexpected light upon some human tangle that is in want of it. A genuine parable told to the audience for which it is intended is not in need of any elucidative matter. Nor is it possible to give its 'gist', except by mere repetition. The strength of a parable is in its' apparent baldness; the appeal of a 'myth' depends on the way it has been dressed out. The bare statement that the Prodigal Son 'wasted his substance in riotous living' must suffice. We are left in ignorance of the light*hearted ladies whose company he sought, we are spared all details of the disreputable revels in which he took part. But we are given particular upon particular about the sights that the Lady



of Shalott saw in her magie mirror and wove in her web. Are the red*cloaked market girls, and the river eddy, and the 'long*haired page in crimson clad' more essential to the poem in which they occur than the accessories which are absent from the story of the Prodigal Son would have been to the parable?
As a matter of fact, this is really the case, and in affirming this it is not at all necessary to endorse Stopford Brooke's theory that 'the Lady of Shalott' was never intended to have any meaning, that it is nothing but 'simplicity in a mask of mysticism', and that Tennyson was either playing with his readers or with his own imagination when he wrote it. (Brooke I, p. 129). 'He saw the island and the girl in the tower, and then the loom and web and mirror crept into the tower; and then he saw the pictures in the mirror, and was pleased to describe them; and then he thought of the curse, and then of Lancelot, and then of death. The poem grew without intention like a flower which had not been on earth before. Yet out of all the fancy arose one touch of reality. What a secluded maid sees are but pictures, but the hour comes when she says, 'I am half sick of shadows'. To know that the pictures of the mind are shadows is to be wild to seek reality. Then if love come, hopeless love, all the world of mere phantasy breaks up, and the actual kills:
Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror cracked from side to side; The curse is some upon me,' cried The Lady of Shalott
If there be meaning at all in this piece of gossamer fancy, that is it, and, like all Tennyson's meanings, it is as simple as the day.'
In his interpretation of the myth Stopford Brooke is no doubt right enough, and the tenuity of its matter was only to be expected. But surely there is something more to be said. It is all very well to assert that a poem has 'just grown' by the simple process of one image starting another. But by what process was the course traced that these successive images have taken? What process accounts for the chain of succession itself? It cannot have been reflexion, since in that case the association of images is an obstacle and a drag. When reflexion has traced the course, images have only



to do as they are bid, to appear when summoned, to go when discharged. It is a difficult process, which as often as not gives us rhetoric rather than poetry. Nor can such a course as we refer to be purely mechanical and inevitable, since the same image, suggested to different persons, will start different trains of rêverie (perhaps of thought), and the course a rêverie takes is determined both by the character of the day=dreamer and by his mental — better: imaginal — equipment. It was the character of Tennyson, the brooder of secluded Somersby, — who must sometimes have chafed for want of action and hated his craft of verse; who must often enough have feit himself cut off from the world and even under a curse, — that, subconsciously operating with the store of imagery furnished by his experience of life, caused him to conceive the motif and to develop it into a myth.
It must never be forgotten that Tennyson was a laborious worker, whose creative method implied — to an extent unusual in the average painstaking author — an incessant sluiting of two functions: the one moment author and creator, drawing upon his subconscious resources, he was reader and critic the next. Tennyson the reader craved for the things Tennyson the author could supply, and the author, ever brooding, asked for nothing better. Tennyson the reader wanted to be set day*dreaming. Tennyson the author 'was only too glad'.
A soliloquy? No, a veritable diviskm of personality. But it is in this connection that the fascination which Tenny* son's poems had for John Stuart Mill becomes understand* able and at the same time finds its justification. One of the hardest thinkers of his age he took his relaxation not by reading society*novels or even 'dreadfuls* (as some eminent scholars and scientists have been known to do), but by giving himself up to the poetic rêverie, and that poet who supplied the rêverie in its purest form, by means of Marianas and Orianas and Dying Swans and faery Ladies of Shalott, was the man for him. But we need not think that Mill was quite clear about this himself. He had the courage of his convictions and warmly defended Tennyson's poetry (in the 'London Review' for July 1835) at a time when liter* ary circles either ignored the camp follower of Keats the Cockney or sneered at him. We are always in danger of



forgetting that as late as 1846, after Tennyson was accorded a civil list pension of £ 200 a year, Bulwer*Lytton could call him 'school*miss Alfred' whom an undiscerning government had thought fit to pension 'while it starved a Knowles'. When Mill, however, (M. p. 154) actually praises 'The Lady of Shalott' for 'powers of narrative and scene*painting com* bined', this eulogium makes us pause. In fact, what narrative the poem contains is swamped by the descriptive matter. The first seven stanzas — there are nineteen in all — are entirely in the present tense, descriptive throughout. The concluding stanza of Part II, the eighth, contains three preterites, only one of which advances the 'story'. The narrative part of 'Part III' is confined to the first half of its first stanza, the second half of its fourth, and to its fifth. Only 'Part IV' can claim to be narrative as a whole, and for the most part it is narrative of the circumstantial kind. As regards the scene*painting Mill overstates his case by using immediately afterwards the term 'statuesque' in preference to 'picturesque'. Even the latter term is not so apt as it looks, exept for 'Part III' with its glowing de* scription of Lancelot flashing into the mirror, but surely epithets like 'suggestive' (having 'the power of making a few touches do the whole work', a thing which Mill, quite justly, credits Tennyson with doing) are exclusive of both, or were so at any rate when Stuart Mill lived, in the pre* Epstein period, when 'statuesque' implied anything that could be viewed 'in the round'.
As a matter of fact so#called descriptive poetry is either suggestive or unreadable. The most gifted poet cannot hope to vie with even a third*rate painter in placingobjects before another's eyes. He cannot transfer his vision in its integrity. He must perforce be satisfied with approximations, approxi* mations rendered possible by the similarity of the feeling* tones that words when uttered — and certain words more than others — are apt to rouse in the hearer. After Tenny* son the poet had written
'On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye
That clothe the wold and meet the sky,' —
we may be sure that the only reader to receive on his retina an image at all corresponding to that of the poet's vision, was Tennyson himself. And even this image may, with sub*



sequent readings, have undergone variations. Verbal sug* gestion will wake images, but whether they will be clear and distinct or vague and blurred, whether they will correspond to the poet's vision or widely differ from it, depends upon the suggestibility of the hearer. About the attending feeling* tones, however, though of course they, too, will vary some* what with individuals, there is a strong assumption of far greater mutual resemblance, which in every*day life is looked upon as practical identity. But, since there is inter» action between feeling*tone and image, so that the senti* ment roused will reinforce the vision and vice versa, the poetic rêverie started in the reader will roughly approxi* mate to the poet's own.
Consisting of subjective material — a myth evolved by the poet's subconscious personality — and composed by means of the subjective method of the rêverie, 'The Lady of Shalott' may be said to be in essence far more lyrical than narrative. There is no disparagement in the affirmation and we would not speak here of lyrical encroachments: the poem is all of a piece, — and a master«piece. But we have dwelt on it at some length, because being one of Tennyson's Jugendgedichte (and the one that has 'worn best') it reveals so very clearly bis poetical equipment and the fibre of his mind, and — what sort of productions were bound to appear when he set his hand to the writing of 'stories'. For it was then that the lyrical encroachments on his narrative became not only apparent but conspicuous.
It has been a time«honoured practice with narrative poets to interrupt the course of their story occasionally, often to invoke 'the Muse', but not infrequently for the mere reason that the context seemed to warrant some lyrical outburst. These interludes we leave out of our account. We could not well spare MUton's hymn to light at the opening of Book III of 'Paradise Lost', nor Keats's 'O sovereign power of love!' introducing Book II of 'Endymion', nor even — longo inter* vallo — Tennyson's 'O purblind race of miserable men' before he resumés the story of Geraint and Enid. Similes, too, call for no comment here. What we term 'encroach* ments' comprise:
first, the conversion into myths of non«symbolical matter;
secondly, the debasement of the story to a mere thread on which to string lyrical 'beads';



thirdly, excessive circumstantiality wherever possible; fourthïy, the 'purple patch'.
The myth*making habit need not detain us long. We have seen how it was the natural outcome of Tennyson's brood* ings and how the practice of turning the same matter over and over in his mind led him inevitably to the perception of 'hidden meanings' and to mythical interpretations. Such interpretations applied to narrative introducé into a story a note of subjectivity closely related to, if not actually identi* cal with, lyricism, and the curious fact that they are absent from his better stories — 'The Princess', 'Enoch Arden', and the earlier 'Idylls of the King' — may not, perhaps, be so difficult to account for. All the time, about seventeen years, that he was at work upon his 'In Memoriam', this long poem, — which is full of symbolism needing but a very few touches to be practically mythopoeic, — must have acted as an absorbent of what his broodings imported. And it would seem that, after the publication of 'In Memoriam', this brooding habit, being in want of other channels or hunting grounds, perceived the possibilities of the Arthurian legend and duly fastened upon it. We would not call the result allegorical, as most people have done. An allegory takes abstractions, and endowing them with flesh, places them in visible shape before our eyes, as in Bunyan's famous book; whereas Tennyson's method was rather to rarefy existing matter, making it possible for one to look through appearances so that the hidden soul might be discerned. But he did not remain consistent in doing so, since he intro* duced abstract matter of his own, grafting abstractions, so to say, on a concrete body of story. And at any rate the fine epic fragment of 1842 called Morte d'Arthur, though it did contain some symbolism, was not mythical at all. Nor were 'Geraint and Enid', 'Merlin and Vivien', 'Lancelqt and Elaine', and 'Guinevere'. As Stopford Brooke says (Vol. II, p. 12): 'They are only modernized by being made a representation of true love and false love. Vivien the harlot is set over against the tender innocence of Elaine. Enid, the true wife, is opposed to Guinevere who has been untrue.... the lesson, the ethical aim, is as yet subordinate to the story. True conduct, as is just in art, is indirectly, not directly, taught.
'But', continues the same author, 'when we come to 1870



— to the volume which began with The Coming of Arthur,
— the inner intention of the whole poem seems to be changed. The making of a kind of epic out of the story of Arthur, which should have an instructive but indirect relation to the moral needs of society and the individual, is placed upon the second plane. The poem is now an allegory of the soul of man warring with sense, and passing on its way through life to death, and through death to resurrection. The great rulers of the kingdom of human nature — the intellect, the conscience, the will, the imagi* nation, the divine spirit in man, are shadowed forth in
mystic personages Arthur is the rational soul, not the
son of Uther and Ygerne, but coming mysteriously from heaven and washed into Merlin's arms by a great wave. Merlin, who educates him, is intellectual power, with all the magie of science. Arthur's kingship is opposed by the brutal and sensual powers in human nature, but the soul beats them down, and Iets in light and justice over the waste places of human nature where the ape, the tiger and the bandit lurk. Guinevere is the heart, and all we mean by the term. The soul, to do its work, must be knit to the heart in noble marriage — Arthur must be wed to Guinevere. The Knights of the Round Table are the high faculties in man whom the soul builds into order round it, to do its just and reforming will. When the King is crowned and married the three great fairies that stand by are Faith, Hope, and Charity; and the Lady of the Lake, 'clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful', who gives the soul Excalibur — the sword of the Spirit — with which to do his warwork against base sense, appetite, and their disordered tyranny, is the Church '
It is true that much of the material is refractory and refuses to fit in with the scheme; that Lancelot in particular is too human to be amalgamated with the other abstractions, and that the author's proceedings with gentle Tristram are no* thing if not drastic. But enough of this.
Of the second sort of lyrical encroachments, the debase* ment of a real story to a mere setting for the greatest possible display of poetical gems, Tennyson offers few examples, a curious fact if we consider what master's influence — apart from Virgil and Theocritus — was dominant in him from the beginning. Anybody wishing to read Keats's 'Endymion',



isabella', or 'Eve of St. Agnes', for the stories these poems contain would be tempted to fling the book down. Their 'rifts' distend with the 'ore' loaded in them 
With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandise, And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories. And many once proud*quiver'd loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes Many all day in dazzling river stood, To take the rich«ored driftings of the flood
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark; For them his ears gush'd blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark Lay full of darts; for them alone did see the
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark: Halfdgnorant, they turn'd an easy wheel, That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.
Why were they proud? Because their marble founts Gush'd with more pride than do a wretch's tears?
Why were they proud? Because fair orange»mounts Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs?
Why were they proud? Because reddined accounts Were richer than the songs of Grecian years?
Why were they proud? again we ask aloud,
Why in the name of Glory were they proud?
Yet were these Florentines as selfsretired
In hungry pride and gainful cówardice, As two close Hebrews....
Thus Keats, but not thus Tennyson, who may err on the side of redundancy, but in a different way, and who does avail himself of Keats's methods, but does so in poems like 'Mariana', nothing but a worked up 'situation' of a story told by another, or 'The Lady of Shalott', in which the 'story' seems to demand that method and no other treatment. There is a significant exception, 'The Lover's Tale', an immature poem, the work of a lad of nineteen, 'salvaged' by the poet himself, years and years afterwards, to prevent its being pirated. Listen to a man crossed in hopeless love:
From that time forth I would not see her more; But many weary moons I lived alone — Alone, and in the heart of the great forest. Sometimes upon the hills beside the sea All day I watch'd the floating isles of shade,



And sometimes on the shore, upon the sands Insensibly I drew her name, until The meaning of the letters shot into My brain; anon the wanton billow wash'd Them over, till they faded like my love. The hoüow caverns heard me — the black brooks Of the midforest heard me — the soft winds, Laden with thistledown and seeds of flowers, Paused in their course to hear me, for my voice Was all of thee: the merry linnet knew me, The squirrel knew me, and the dragondly Shot by me like a flash of purple fire. The rough brier tore my bleeding palms; the hemlock, Browdiigh, did strike my forehead as I past; Yet trod I not the wildflower in my path, Nor bruised the wildbird's egg.
Was this the end? Why grew we then together in one plot? Why fed we from one fountain? drew one sun? Why were we one in all things, save in that Where to have been one had been the cope and crown Of all I hoped and fear'd? — if that same nearness Were father to this distance, and that one Vauntcourier to this doublé? if Affection Living slew Love, and Sympathy hew'd out The bosomssepulchre of Sympathy?
The last few lines savour less of Keats than of the Eliza* bethans, and it may be observed in passing that a certain weakness for conceitdike phrasing reminiscent of the English Renascence continued to cling to Tennyson. The line about Lancelot and Guinevere:
'And faith unfaithful kept them falsely true', is a very familiar instance. So is Elaine's testimony:
'I know not if I know what true love is, But if I know, then, if I love not him, I know there is none other I can love."
**) The following lines from 'The Holy Grail' suggest that Percivale was closely related to Sebastian in 'Twelfth Night': 'A woman', answer'd Percivale, 'a nun, And one no further off in blood from me Than sister; and if ever holy maid With knees of adoration wore the stone, A holy maid; tho' never maiden glow'd, But that was in her earlier maidenhood, With such a fervent flame of human love, Which being rudely blunted, glanced and shot Only to holy things '



Returning to Keats's method of larding narrative with lyricism, we may say that, if in this he was not imitated by the mature Tennyson, the latter's strong lyrical impulse, refusing to be altogether repressed, took its revenge by inducing the poet again and again to insert songs in his narrative. This peculiarity forms a special feature of 'The Princess', as if the poet, in the opinion that his story was not imposing enough to be made welcome for its own sake, had tried to disarm criticism by decking it out with a number of undoubted lyrical jewels. These songs are of two kinds. Some serve for interludes between two successive cantos, others are introduced into the story by making some character in it recite or sing them. The former kind are in stanzas, and have a familiar look. The others — ostensibly written in the same 'iambic pentameters' as the body of the narrative, but in reality very different from it — have been called isometric lyrics, and show the poet's indebtedness to Theocritus and his school. Such are 'Now sleeps the crimson petal' and 'Come down, o maid'; and of like character — though riming and sometimes modelled on Welsh Mplets — are Merlin's riddles in 'The Coming of Arthur', Vivien's songs in 'Balin and Balan' and in 'Merlin and Vivien', and the novice's 'Too Late' in 'Guinevere'.
But we have now come to our third point, excessive circumstantiality, which, contrary to the immediate impres* sion the unwary reader is apt to receive from it, is not at all a sign of imaginative wealth but rather the reverse, as it gives evidence not only of a calculating wish to use up all available 'poetical' material, but likewise of a somewhat morbid apprehension lest anything so precious should go unheeded by the reader and fail of its effect. The poet's mind loves to dweil upon the various stages and details of his narrative, but at the same time he is conscious — over* conscious — of his audience; in fact we have here a curious 'chemical compound' of lyricism and pedagogy.
Hence the circumstantiality of lines like the following (taken from 'The Princess' V):
A strangled titter, out óf which there brake
On all sides, clamouring etiquette to death,
Unmeasured mirth; while now the two old kings
Began to wag their baldness up and down,
The fresh young captains flash'd their glittering teeth,



The huge bushsbearded Barons heaved and blew, And slain with laughter roll'd the gilded squire.
Hence the excessive circumstantiality of
... .tomorrow morn We hold a great convention: then shall they That love their voices more than duty, learn With whom they deal dismiss'd in shame to live No wiser than their mothers, household stuff, Live chattels, mincers of each other's fame, Full of weak poison, turnspits for the clown, The drunkards' football, laughing.stocks of Time, Whose brains are in their hands and in their heels, But fit to f launt, to dress, to dance, to thrum, To tramp, to scream, to burnish, and to scour, For ever slaves at home and fools abroad.
('The Princess', IV)
This is not the genuine language of passion that must either spend itself in invective or kill. It is too desultory for speech at white heat, which cannot help sticking to one subject, and its inferiority becomes apparent as soon as we place it by the side of the following passage from Arnold's 'Sohrab and Rustum':
'Girl! nimble with thy feet, not with thy hands 1
Curled minion, dancer, coiner of sweet words'
Fight; let me hear thy hateful voice no more!
Thou art not in Afrasiab's gardens now
With Tartar girls, with whom thou art wont to dance;
But on the Oxus sands, and in the dance
Of battle, and with me, who make no play
Of war: I fight it out, and hand to hand.
Speak not to me of truce, and pledge, and wine!
Remember all thy valour: try thy feints
And cunning: all the pity I had is gone '
The retarding effects of Tennyson's verse*structure, of his emphatically slow, 'end*stopped' lines, which do not allow any detail to escape unnoticed and which afford regular pauses enabhng the reader to soak up the entire purport of the preceding line, are closely related to this circumstan* tiality:
A prince I was, bluceyed, und fair in face, Of temper amorous, as the first of May, With lengths of yellow ringlet, like a giri,
For on my cradle shone the Northern star 
My mother pitying made a thousand prayers;



My mother was as mild as any saint, Half*canonized by all that look'd on her, So gracious was her tact and tenderness: But my good father thought a king a king; He cared not for the affection of the house....
The same may be said of Tennyson's love for enumera* tion by means of anaphora. The Lady Blanche complams:
Then came your new friend: you began to change —
I saw it and grieved — to slacken and to cool;
Till taken with her seeming openness
You tum'd your warmer currents all to her,
To me you froze: this was my meed for all.
Yet I bore up in part from ancient love,
And partly that I hoped to win you back,
And partly conscious of my own deserts.
And partly that you were my civil head,
And chiefly you were born for something great,
In which I might your feUWworker be....'
(The Princess, Part IV.)
Geraint in his uxoriousness, never leaving his wife, grew Forgetful of his promise to the King, Forgetful of the falcon and the hunt, Forgetful of the tilt and tournament, Forgetful of his glory and his name, Forgetful of his princedom and its cares.
In the following quotation from The Princess' (VII) the word 'partly' might be inserted after each 'and:
And out of memories of her kindlier days, And sidelong glances at my father's grief, And at the happy lovers heart in heart — And out of hauntings of my spoken love, And lonely listenings to my mutter'd dream, And often feeling of the helpless hands, And wordless broodings on the wasted cheek —
From all a closer interest flourish'd up 
It is a mannerism, of course, and wül by many be called a rhetorical device, which, too, may be conceded. But «us does not imply that the passages quoted are nothing but rhetoric. We must be careful to distinguish subjective rheto* ric which is lyrical in its nature and intent, from obiective rhetoric, which is composed throughout with an eye on the audience one is addressing. There was an audience^ no doubt, but it is exceedingly unlikely that Tennyson thought those Victorian ladies and gentlemen so stupid as to De really in want of his specifications. We may call it egotism



or subjectivity, no matter, so long as we recosnise * for what itis, an outcome of Tennyson's p^^^L u£d the deyice in order to arrest, arrange, and give shane to Iht swarrning fancies constituting his rêverie ftffi * used metre, as he used stanzaie forms, things Xh please
thlL y fdl.sc"mmat1l?n' b^tow the term «rhetoric' onTny thing metrical anything stanzaie, nay, anything merelv w?it
The tendency we have signalized here is essentiaüy lyrical' and the same thing may be affirmed with respect to Tennv.'
•nStati°n\°f Theocr"™ and his schooL Thie X£ could influence him because he was 'made Lt way' and
ÏWrLanSstoffthah ^ had remained !~ «t S£ S W(iUld. neverth^ have utilized J neoentean devices — of his own invention And the^ devices would1 have retarded the 'story,' just as weU as those
tLe itr™ W SP°ken- Ab0ut rï&TS foTcï o J9nopconsen^ of opinion. Harold nIcoI on
devices sLlflr*VUlêeStS that Tenn^ utilized the uevices signalized with the purpose of givins to his h1*nt
zzs°i:zzsizo1 speed ^d coS*? wiïs
mShVk ? ïs Vlew seems incomprehensible A case Sfif made.out Biblical influence Surely the paral lehsm we find in a passage like P
Pursued him down the street, 'and fa7awa7 Among the honest shoulders of the crowd Kead rascal in the motions of his back And scoundrel in the supple-sliding knee.'
(Sea Dreams)
r&t^T °- the °ld Testament than of anything else But the main point, on which we must insist is Tennv son's lyricism when narrating ' enny*
^H^tylilZ!^0^ f°r his 'purple p^es' as
19



The typical instance is the well*known description of the island in 'Enoch Arden', excellent in its way, splendid m imparting a poet's vision, but psychologically ^correct failing to give what it purports to g^e: the feehngs of a shipwrecked saüor on an island in the Pacific. Better, be* cause in harmony with its setting, is a purple passage hke
He heard the deep behind him, and a cry Before. His own thought drove him, like a goad. Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves And harren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels. — (Morte d Arthur)
But in Tennyson's narrative verse the 'purple patch' is rarer than what we might term 'the purple srrip; for instance where icebergs are eaUed 'the moving isles of wmter ('Morte d'Arthur') and a poacher 'a nightly wirer of the innocent hare' ('Aylmer's Field'), King Arthur s moustache 'the knightly growth that fringed his lips and the baskets of fish sold by Enoch Arden 'Enoch's ocean*spod in ocean* smelling osier'. These and similar things show, in neWassic fashion, Tennyson's wit; they are subjective intrusions in the narrative; they are what we have called lyrical encroach* ments' Those given above are more artificial than most of them. Tennyson is often enough satisfied with just a touch of colour conveyed in little more than a single hne; but in that case he is apt to lay stress on his find, under* lining it, so to say, by means of repetition, refram*hke repetition, far different from the formulary repetition met with in Homer. Such refrains, introducing songdike elements into the story are found in 'Enoch Arden':
'So these were wed, and merrily rang the beüs And merrily ran the years ', —
in 'Balin and Balan':
'Sprays grated, and the canker'd boughs without Whined in the wood....', —
in 'Dora':
' and the reapers reap'd >
And the sun feil, and all the land was dark.



Our last quotation is especially remarkable, since it was taken from a poem written in Tennyson's austerest fashion, m a style which, though praised by some, has by the major* ïty of critica been pronounced bald; — and indeed, there can be no doubt about its simplicity being over*deliberate. Ihe fact is that Tennyson «forced his talent' when writing thus. it was not in his nature to achieve perfect simplicity m narrative, — simplicity which is as far removed from baldness as it is from over*decoration, — though in 'Godiva' ne came very near to it, and though the subdramatic method wmch he adopted from Browning later on must have suited nis personality well enough, since it led to the comparative simplicity of achievements like 'Rizpah'. A poem like 'Dora* must be considered an experiment, in which Tennyson, con* scious of his bent towards ornate diction, tried to combat what his mtelligence — but not his 'inmost soul' — recog* nisedasaweakness.Andindoingso,to borrow an expressive herman locution, he threw out the baby with the bath:
With farmer Allan at the farm abode
William and Dora. William was his son
And she his niece. He often look'd at them,
And often thought, Til make them man and wife.'
Surely an opening like this is not 'poetry' at all, being equally devoid of feeling*tones, of imagery, and of rhvth* mical swmg.
§ 2. We have already discussed Swinburne as the romancer of «The Tale of Balen'. We have commented on the slavish care, the painstaking superstJtion, so to say, with which, in writing this narrative poem, Swinburne stuck to his source, Malory. A rambling and muddled story from the first, he left it much as it was, adding little of his own mvention, not even much lyricism, but, as the exigencies of the stanzaie form he had chosen compelled him, eking out the story with padding and stopgaps. We have now to con* «der him as the rehandler of the Tristram saga, as the poet of Tristram of Lyonesse', in which the encroachmentVof lyricism have assumed alarming proportions.
Ihe view sometimes maintamed that romanticism is not 1 rZf • t0 the °Af,stOTy*teMing, is not ours. Scott was a romantic, so was Alexandre Dumas, pére. Both were glonous story*teilers. But the point is this" that the telling



of their stories engrossed them so completely that they were at no pains meanwhile to listen to the beatmgs of their hearts, or to indulge in repeated enumerations of what wind and sun, sky, wood and sea said and did at each stage of the proceedings. Swinburne was of different stuff, and ne knew it. In the 'Dedicatory Epistle' prefixed to the Col* lected Edition' of his poems he disclaims (p. XVII) any narrative intention in trying his hand at Tristram. After* wards, in writing 'Balen', which he professed to adnure for its 'Homeric' qualities (op. cit. p. XXVIII), he ching to Malory's garbled text as an unskilled horseman will chng to the saddle of his mount. Story*telhng was beyond hun, but he managed to salve his selfcrespect by converting this inabihty into something to be proud of; thus: Even had 1 ever feit the same impulse to attempt and the same ambition to achieve the enterprise of epic or narrative that 1 had always feit with regard to lyric or dramatic work, / could never have proposed to myself the lowly and unambitious aim of competiüon with the work of so notabitr a con* temporary workman in the humbler branch of that line as William Morris. No conception could have been further from my mind when I undertook to rehandle the deathless legend of Tristram than that of so modest and preposterous a trial of rivalry.' The italics are ours, - and the Wilham Morris referred to was the author of 'Sigurd the Volsung and the Fali of the Niblungs'. The highbrow attitude towards story*teling is worthy of Stuart Mül himself. And in this humble art Swinburne could have excelled, no doubt, 'if he had only wanted to', as the schoolboys say.
The rhapsodical 'Prelude', pitched in so high a key as to compel the poet to sing in an almost continuous f alsetto, is followed by nine essentially lyrical 'studies which presup* pose on the reader's part a knowledge not only of the mam outlines of the story, but also of the Arthurian legend with which it was in after times connected; some of these studies containing no narrative at all, others only just enough to furnish us with a clue to the situation. No English reader, unless previously enlightened, will, for instance understand why 'Tristram' is a 'bitter name'. 'Never mind, the upholder of Mill's theory will say, 'we plead the soliloquizing charac* ter of lyricism. Faulfcfinding is preposterous in such cases, provided Swinburne understood his own meaning, a thing



he obviously did'. But it is exactly in Swinburne's case that we cannot allow the plea, for its admission would deprive purely narrative parts, like the opening of the first 'section' ('The Sailing of the Swallow'), of all function and meaning:
About the middle music of the spring
Came from the castled shore of Ireland's king
A fair ship stoutly sailing, eastward bound
And south by Wales and all its wonders round
To the loud rocks and ringing reaches home
That take the wild wrath of the Cornish foam,
Past Lyonesse unswallowed of the tides
And high Carlion that now the steep sea hides
To the wind«hollowed heights and gusty bays
Of sheer Tintagel, fair with famous days.
Above the stem a gilded swallow shone,
Wrought with straight wings and eyes of glittering stone
As flying sunward oversea, to bear
Green summer with it through the singing air.
And on the deck between the rowers at dawn,
As the bright sail with brightening wind was drawn,
Sat with full face against the strengthening light
Iseult, more fair than foam or dawn was white 
Except for the very Swinburnian comparison in the last line the whole of this quotation might have been written by William Morris. But now the narrative halts, the Swin* burnian comparison ushering in a long outburst of Swin* burnian description.
The charms of Iseult must be sung, a truly arduous task, calling into play all the pyrotechnical and kaleidoscopical resources at Swinburne's command. In his descriptive exuberance he easily outdistances the poet of 'The Eve of Saint Agnes', and the tabulation of Iseult's attractions is thrice the length of the introductory narrative. Small wonder, then, if it is incongruous in places:
Her gaze was glad past love's own singing of. And her face lovely past desire of love. Past thought and speech her maiden motions were, And a more golden sunrise was her hair.
Surely, after the 'moral' content of the first three lines quoted, the purely sensuous fourth comes with the effect of an anticlimax. And surely, after pronouncing Iseult's beauty so perfect as to kill desire, Swinburne should not have given the he to his own words by immediately proceeding to an



enraptured catalogue of 'fleshy charms'. Follows a long de* scription of Tristram, in the course of which the poet is betrayed into using verbiage like:
Famous and full of fortune was his youth
Ere the beard's bloom had left his cheek unsmooth,
And in his face a lordship of strong joy
And height of heart no chance could curb or cloy
Lightened, and all that warmed them at his eyes
Loved them as larks that kindie as they rise
Toward light they turn to music love the blue strong skies.
It is matter of common knowledge that Swinburne was continually forgetting the difference in structure between English and the classic tongues, and that his syntax suffered in consequence. What was it in Tristram that 'no chance could curb or cloy'? The 'lordship' 'lightening' in his face? Was it his heart, or his 'height of heart'? But how can lord* ship be cloyed by chance? Or must we admit that chance can curb a height? It is hard to believe that Swinburne could have understood his own meaning here. And it is easy to see that the poetic soliloquy, unchecked and uncontrolled, is in constant danger of producing nonsense. Then, as regards Tristram's eyes, it is all right to associate their blue colour with the sky, and quite legitimate to make them suggest strength. But what about the restl Is the blue eye ever thought 'warm'? If such was really Swinburne's opinion, the chief thing we learn from this passage is not how people feit towards Tristram, — but it is the poet's spiritual isolation from his fellowmen. Other passages might be quoted in cor* roboration of our contention. What, for instance are we to make of this (op. cit. p. 17):
Chance cast him westward on the low sweet strand Where songs are sung of the old green Irish land, And the sky loves it, and the sea loves best. And as a bird is taken to man's breast The sweet»souled land where sorrow sweetest sings Is wrapt round with them as with hands and wings And taken to the sea's heart as a flower ?
The word 'them', italicized by us, must refer to 'songs' in our second line. It is reflection that makes this clear, but between the antecedent and the pronoun the poet has insert* ed about half*a*dozen other notions, enough to bewilder even the most imaginative reader. And so an island wrapt



round with handlike and winglike songs resembles a flower that the sea takes to her heart, a strange specimen of imagi* native logic. Of course it is not always thus. There is the splendid image of the tern — Swinburne calls it a sea»gull — taking its plunge downward:
And as the seasgull hovers high, and turns
With eyes wherein the keen heart glittering yearns
Down toward the sweet green sea whereon the broad noon burns,
And suddenly, soubstricken with delight,
Drops, and the glad wave gladdens, and the light
Sees wing and wave confuse their fluttering white,
So Tristram (op cit. p. 71)
There is another, of Tristram's 'Swallow' battling with the stormy waves:
So for an hour they fought the storm out still,
And the shorn foam spun from the blades, and high
The keel sprang from the wavemdge, and the sky
Glared at them for a breath's space through the rain;
Then the bows with a sharp shock plunged again
Down, and the sea clashed on them, and so rose
The bright stem like one panting from swift blows,
And as a swimmer's joyous beaten head
Rears itself laughing, so in that sharp stead
The light ship lifted her long quivering bows
As might a man his buffeted strong brows
Out of the wavesbreach; for with one stroke yet
Went all men's oars together, strongly set
As to loud music, and with hearts uplift
They smote their strong way through the drench and drift:
Till the keen hour had chafed itself to death
And the east wind feil fitfully, breath by breath,
Tired; and across the thin and slackening rain
Sprang the face southward, of the sun again. (op. elf. p. 35).
There is the picture of Iseult when Tristram
strained her to him till her faint breath sank
And her bright light limbs palpitated and shrank
And rose and fluctuated as flowers in rain
That bends them and they tremble and rise again
And heave and straighten and quiver all through with bliss
And turn afresh their mouths up for a kiss.... (op. cit. p. 51).
Or shorter flashes like:
... .on the blown beach of a glad new sea
Wherein strange rocks like fighting men stand scarred....
(op. cit. p. 93)
or:
... .like the trunk of some grim tree sawn through
Reeled Urgan fop. cit. p. 116).



But after conceding the beauty of all these passages, and of many more, we still find ourselves confronted with the inexorable question: how many pages of undoubted poetry are required to atone for pages upon pages of literary 'pinchbeck'? This is neither sacrilege nor ca villing. Any pers plexed reader of Swinburne will be benefited by a warning to this effect: Beware of your poet when, being in want of images, he is content to draw upon a very constant and exceedingly limited supply ready to hand, such as foam: flowers, se&roses, rosy feathers of the spray, blossoms that bloom, landeroses, roses, rosy ruin, blossoms of the dawn, a sun like a flower afloat, a soul like a mystical red flower, a budlike spirit that breaks rosetfashion, the rose of a woman bursting, red as flame, from a full sheath, May day blood that flushes, and life putting forth the irrevocable flower, — all of which instances, be it observed, have been taken from two successive pages chosen at random (26 and 27). Like* wise beware of him when, being in want of rimes, he fiddles, with a virtuosity worthy of his beloved Victor Hugo him* self, on the old but reliable strings of fire and desire, love and dove, hour and flower, south (or drouth) and mouth, one and sun, death and breath 
Let us confine ourselves to the last>mentioned pair, leav* ing the 'Prelude' alone:
Page 17:
And that sad queen to whom his life was death, A rose plucked forth of summer in mid breath.
Page 28:
Among the grey grass rough as old rent hair And wicked herbage whitening like despair And blown upon with blasts of dolorous breath From gaunt rare gaps and hollow doors of death.
Page 29:
That was the nurse of Launcelot, and most sweet Of all that move with magical soft feet Among us, being of lovelier blood and breath, Should shut him in with sleep as kind as death.
Page 32:
Thy soul is shed into me with thy breath, Even one life to be gathered of one death.



Page 35:
TUI the keen hour had chafed itself to death And the east wind feil fitfully, breath by breath..
Page 46:
short gusts of changing wind That panted like a sick man's fitful breath: And like a moan of lions hurt to death Came the sea's hollow noise 
Page 49:
But like a babbling tale of barren breath Seemed all report and rumour held of death 
Page 50:
Only with stress of soft fierce hands she prest Between the throbbing blossoms of her breast His ardent face, and through his hair her breath Went quivering as when life is hard on death.
Page 51:
Is it so much I ask thee, and spend my breath In askmg? nay, thou knowest it is but death.
Page 55:
So rolls the great wheel of the great world round, And no change in it and no fault is found, And no true life of perdurable breath, And surely no irrevocable death.
Page 57:
The wmds that lighten and the waves that strive loward this shore as to that beneath thy breath Because m me my thoughts bear all towards death?
Page 59:
Clothe it with other names than day or night, And its own soul of strength and spirit of breath Feed it with other powers than life or death —
Page 60:
Will the storm cry not when he bids it cease? Is it his voice that saith to the east wind, Peace? Is his breath mightier than the west wind's breath? Doth his heart know the things of life and death?



Page 62:
... .one that saw Not without révérence and sweet sense of awe But wholly without fear or fitful breath The face of life watched by the face of death 
Page 71:
.... thence again Might he win forth into the green great main Far on beyond, and there yield up his breath At least, with God's will by no shameful death....
Page 71 again:
All this came hard upon him in a breath; And how he marvelled in his heart that death Should be no bitterer than it seemed to be There 
Page 74:
and the breath
Feit on his face did not his will to death 
Page 75:
And will that strove unwülingly with will it might not break, Feil silent as a wind abashed, whose breath Dies out of heaven, suddenly done to death 
Page 81:
And time is long since last I feit the touch, The sweet touch of my lover, hand and breath, In such delight as puts delight to death 
Page 83:
Life palpable, compact of blood and breath, Visible, present, naked, very death 
Page 83 again:
Ah, what years
Would I endure not, filled up full with tears, Bitter like blood and dark as dread of death, To win one amorous hour of mingling breath....
Page 83 again:
One, but one hour from birth of joy to death, For all these hungering hours of feverish breath?
Page 92:
Lord, whose breath
Speaks music through the deathless lips of death Whereto time's heart rings answer 



Page 93:
not with dry-drawn veins and lingering breath
Shall these through crumbling hours crouch down to death.
Page 99:
and their breath
Stirs the soft springs of deathless life and death, Death that bears life, and change that brings forth seed Of life to death and death to life indeed 
Page 100:
1, what gift can I give thee?
Peril and sleepless watches, fearful breath Of dread more bitter for my sake than death When death came nigh to call me by my name 
Page 101:
For all this wild sweet waste of sweet vain breath, Thou knowest I know thou hast given me life, not death.
Page 102:
The queen Morgause of Orkney.... Whose wordless charms defile the saintly skies, Bright still with fire and pulse of blood and breath, Whom her own sons have doomed for shame to death.
Page 104:
As ripples reddening in the roughening breath Of the eager east when dawn does night to death, So rose and stirred and kindled in her thought Fierce barren fluctuant fires 
Page 106:
The sea's was like a doomsman's blasting breath From lips afoam with ravenous lust óf death
Page 107:
Fear and strong exultation caught her breath, And triumph like the bitterness of death 
Page 111:
Cast not away one prayer, one suppliant breath, On me that commune all this while with death.
Page 111 again:
....till the keen wind's word Seemed of her own soul spoken, and the breath All round her not of darkness, but of death.



Page 114:
And willingly compelled against her will She yielded, saying within her own soul still Some season yet of soft or stormier breath Should haply give her life again or death 
Page 117:
The fiend put forth his might more strong for pain
And cleft the great knighfs glittering shield in twain,
Laughing for very wrath and thirst to kill,
A beast's broad ïaugh of blind and wolfish will,
And smote again ere Tristram's lips drew breath
Panting, and swept as by the sense of death,
That surely should have touched and sealed them fast
Save that the sheer stroke shrilled aside....
Page 118:
And yet might soul not break the bonds of sense And bring her to him in very life and breath More than had this been even the sea of death That washed between them 
Page 121:
And all these things fled fleet as light or breath Past, and his heart waxed cold and dull as death 
Page 124:
and scarce for half a doubtful breath
His bright light heart held half a thought of death And knew not whence this darkling thought might be.
Page 131:
When at his young strength's peril he made free Cornwall and slew beside its bordering sea The fair land's foe, who yielding up his breath Yet left him wounded nigh to dark slow death.
Page 133:
Till joy be found a shadow and sorrow a breath And life no discord in the tune with death, But all things fain alike to die and live 
Page 134:
Nor shall they feel or fear, whose date is done, Aught that made once more dark the living sun And bitterer in their breathing lips the breath Than the dark dawn and bitter dust of death.



Page 135:
Force that perforce transfigures dream to deed, God that begets on time, the body of death, Eternity: nor may man's darkening breath, Albeit it stain, disfigure or destroy The glass wherein the soul sees life and joy 
Page 136:
With loves and mercies on its lips that hiss Comfort, and kill compassion with a kiss. And strike the world black with their blasting breath; That ghost whose core of life is very death 
Page 138:
and her life was turned to fiery thirst.
And all her soul was hunger, and its breath Of hope and life a blast of raging death.
Page 141:
I knew not life could so long breathe such breath As 1 do. Nay, what grief were this, if death, The sole sure friend of whom the whole world saith That death would heal not grief — if death were dead And all ways closed whence grief might pass with life!"
Then softly spake his watching virgin wife Out of her heart, deep down below her breath: "Fear not but death shall come — and after death Judgment."
Page 141 again:
....and mine own ears heard
The deep sweet sound once of his godlike word 
Who sleeps and dies not, but with soft live breath Takes always all the deep delight of death, Through love's gift of a woman 
Page 143:
How much more than the springtide, how much more Than sweet strong sea*wind quickening wave and shore With one divine pulse of continuous breath, If she might kiss me with the kiss of death 
Page 143 again:
Surely your own souls shall have peace in death And pass with benediction in their breath 



Page 145:
And no fear touched him of her eyes above And ears that hoarded each poor word whence love Made sweet the broken music of his breath. "Iseult, my life that wast and art my death, My life in life that hast been, and that art Death in my death....
Shall death keep time and thou not keep with me?"
And the white married maiden laughed at heart, Hearing, and scarce with lips at all apart Spake, and as fire between them was her breath; "Yea, now thou liest not: yea, for I am death."
Page 148:
Nor sleepless languor with its weary wing.
Nor harsh estrangement, born of time's vain breath,
Nor change, a darkness deeper far than death.
To the undaunted reader who has been able to plod through the above collection of repetitive passages, our har* vest of Swinburnian variations upon the one theme of 'death plus breath' will appear sufficiently abundant. Let us admit at once that not a few of them are quite felicitous, — after all, Swinburne is Swinburne, — but this does not alter the fact that, to an ear that constantly hears what is read, their cumulative effect is simply exasperating. A consideration of the way in which he utilizes other riming pairs, such as fire and desire, would have yielded similar results. Yet we have never seen these tricks of ihe trade — they are no more, and in exhausting all their possibüities Swinburne was not an inspired artist, but a cunning artisan — remarked upon by critics, though some of them have occasionally signalized other defects that are nearly allied. Edward Thomas e.g. observes (op. cit. p. 217) that 'doing without much action he inevitably falls into excessive multiplication without variety. When Tristram has said that Iseult's hands used to be more to him than watersprings to shadeless lands he says also what her hair, her mouth and her breast used to be, and so everywhere. When Iseult has been listening to Tristram's story and sighs and sees the sun at that moment rise up, the sun's face burns against hers like a lover's: but also the sea shone and shivered like angel's wings; a wind shook the foam flowers as a rainfall of sea roses, for the foam was like blossoms; the moon withered as a face in a



swoon; the air was moved with delight and passion as of love, until air, light and wave seemed full of beating rest like a newsmated dove's heart, and had a motion as of one God's beating breast.'
Thomas's unimpeachable statement of fact would seem to convey more 'damning', than 'praise', and for a little while longer the critic goes on in this strain (op. cit. p. 218):
'Everything is done which can make the poem everywhere grand or sumptuous, and inevitably, since. all comes from Swinburne, it is at times stiff and heavy laden. Every inch is Swinburne's. Compare it with Romeo and Juliet. There the love and beauty is so much beyond the sum of the details, that beautiful as they often are the effect of the whole aston* ishes and makes the words seem the servants of greater spirits. No catalogue of beautiful things and no cabinet of beautiful words can produce beauty, and Swinburne's poem....' —
The assenting reader who expects the continuation of this sentence to run somewhat in this way:
gives pages upon pages and passages upon passages which are
little else than the catalogues and cabinets referred to', —
opens his eyes on seeing Edward Thomas taking fright and continuing instead:
' is far more than a catalogue or a cabinet';
Thomas, however, takes heart again:
'but the total result of his expenditure is not astonishing or disproportionate. Shakespeare uses the breath of life, Swin* burne uses gold, frankincense, and myrrh.'
True again, and we may add that besides the three ingre* dients mentioned, a conscientious analysis reveals simula* tion*gold and other substitutes in the compound. Our list of 'death and breath' quotations should suffice for proof. Many of them are worthless as poetry, especially those in which 'death' figures in comparisons with as or than, though we must confess that in this respect 'Balen', discussed before, is far worse; that the passages quoted from pp. 28, 46, 93, 104, 143, are splendid; and that a few more are tolerable, apart from the irritating riming trick.40) But let us once more listen
*°) Compare Pope's welMcnown lines ('Essay on Criticism', 348—353): While they ring round the same unvary'd chimes, With sure returns of still expected rhymes;



to Edward Thomas, who, after duly rejoicing that, compared with 'Endymion' and 'Laon and Cythna', 'Tristram of Lyonesse is at least as readable and exuberant' (our italics), proceeds: 'Few poets have more gold, frankincense, and myrrh to offer, and having the breath of life strong within himself he uses them successfully to sweeten and adorn. His dangling sentences, his use of addition instead of develop* ment, his abuse of some of his favourite habits or devices of style, are not in excess of what is to be expected in the work of a man's hands.'
Pace Edward Thomas, we are disagreeably conscious of the excess, — and of Swinburne the critic's obvious want of self*criticism. It may, of course, be a personal matter only. Or it may be the merest presumption on the part of a Dutch critic to disagree with an English (or Welsh) colleague's verdict. On the other hand, is there not the barest possibil* ity that such an English critic is not sufficiently detached; that, being a child of his time, he has imbued certain prepos* sessions; that especially the habit of identifying onself with the anti«Tennysonian reaction that came to the surfaceinthe 'eighteen nineties' and has not yet spent itself, though there are signs of a change, causes him to read poems written in conscious rivalry of certain of Tennyson's, — through col* oured glasses as it were, much as a theologian reads his Bible through the spectacles of his catechism? We are not con* scious of having an axe to grind that is destined to send Swinburne's head to the block. But we join issue with defenders that palliate what ought not to be palliated. To mention a thing that we have not yet touched on, what is .the 'beauty' of the following 'device' of style ('vice' would be a better word) to which Swinburne is much addicted, and whose artificiaUty becomes manifest the moment one sets oneself to translate it into another language? We might call it the (a + na) formula, and may observe at once that Swinburne has set a pernicious example in using it so frequently, for Sir Wilham Watson's poems are infested by
Where-e'er you find "the cooling western breeze," In the next line it "whispers through the trees"; If crystal streams "with pleasant murmurs creep," The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with "sleep".... We may observe here that the 'breath-death rime' is of rare occurrence in Pope.



it and it is rampant in Roy Campbell's Tlaming Terrapin' from Tristram of Lyonesse' we cull:
1. Eyes....
That had seen sway from side to sundering side The steel flow of that terrible springtide That the moon rules not 
(op. cit. p. 16).
2. Tristram and Iseult, hand in amorous hand 
(ibid. p. 39).
3. When the clear sea for miles on glimmering miles Burned as though down were strewn abroad astray.
4 au- , (ibid' p-
....and his soul,
That had seen all those sightless seasons roll
One after one; wave over weary wave.
Was in him as a corpse is in its grave.
(ibid. p. 56).
5. And how men found them in the wild woods green Meeping, but sundered by the sword between, Dividing breast from amorous breast a span..'..
(ibid. p. 69).
And then we are quite surprised to find, on page 106:
'Dim thought on thought, and darkling dream on dream,'
instead of
Thought on dim thought, and dream on darkling dream,' a line which, metrically, would be well enough
As our fifth instance is the last that Tristram of Lvo* nesse yields, it would seem as if Swinburne himself had at last wearied of the, frequently absurd, device. But it can hardly have been better insight that prompted him to give >t l1Cï' othe™ise he w°«ld also have discarded it in what he had already written. This is what Tennyson would have done, and we begin to wonder whether T S Eliot's dictum Swinburne's intelligence is not defective, it is im* pure m The Sacred Wood' (p. 35), does not apply to his artistic conscience, or conscientiousness, as well It is a dtsagreeable thought. Can a poetic soliloquy - judged by Mills entenon, since the poem under discussion is chiefly £ÏÏ u ! va.IualJe to a reader ^ the writer is not per* T.St+ Wlth.himflf? Could Swinburne really have tned to foist spunous beauty on Swinburne? But, if the writing of a poem is not a soliloquy, if _ as has been our contention from the first - the consciousness of having an



andience is generally at the back — and not infrequently in or near the foreground — of even a lyrical poet's mind, — what are we to think of the esteem in which that audience was held by a poet like Swinburne?
It will be safest to assume that Swinburne's taste — and taste in our opinion is little else than the interaction of a man's character and his surroundings — was exceptional or peculiar. Romantic exuberance runs riot in his work. Tenny* son's manner is leisurely. When a subject strikes him he wants to give us every aspect of it. But he knows — with the exception of the last lines of 'Enoch Arden' — when to stop. Swinburne does not. His is the literary mill that keeps on grinding. He can no more get rid of his roses than he can discard his, often meaningless, alliterations,41) remoye his by no means infrequent cacophonies,*2) or resist his
41) Compare our contribution to 'Neophilologus' X (p. 125). Charcot would have defined Swinburne's intellectual type as 'motorial': his rhythms are faultiess and irresistible, his alliterations came of them* selves'. But whereas
' many a long blithe wave
Buoved their blithe bark between the bare black rocks.' J (op. cit. p. 94)
is splendidly suggestive of a bobbing vessel, there is far more alliteration just for alliteration's sake in other places:
"Nor elf nor ouphe or aught of airier kind,"
Quoth she, "though made of moonbeams moist and blind,^
Is light if weighed with man's winged weightless mind 
(op. cit. p. 97).
Is there anyone who can assign a function, an effect, a meaning, to the 'voweballiteration' of the first line, to the m's of the second, to the w*s of the third? «) Excessive sibilancy is one of Swinburne's great faults. Compare: '....And he sighed,
Seeing, and with eyes set sadly toward his bride Laid him down...." (°P- cit P- 74)-
and his heart waxed cold and dull as death,
Or swelled but as the tides of sorrow swell, To sink with sullen sense of slow farewell.
So surely seemed the silence even to sigh 
(ibid. p. 121).
Next to. sibilancy comes monotony consisting in repeating the same vowel over and over again:
Us too, when all the tears of time are dry,
The night shall lighten from her tearless eye.
Blind is the day and eyeless all its light,
But the large unbewildered eye of night
Hath sense.... (ibid. p. U).



craving for oxymorons and similar verbal jugglery.4")
In the course of this section we have had occasion once or twice to refer to Tennyson. We must now speak of him again. It is seldom realized how much Swinburne owed to the man who was both his predecessor and his contempo* rary. It is true, Swinburne takes the part of passion against lennysonian restraint. He retains, displaying his 'faithful* ness to the old story, the unsavoury details of Brangwain personating Iseult the first night of Mark's marriage- of the king yielding up Iseult to Sir Palamede for the sake of his vow — as if his wife were his chattel; and, of course, of the fateful philtre. For none of these things Tennyson could have had any use. But Swinburne's indebtedness is there It is camouflaged in various ways, by the use of 'heroic yerse, by variant spellings of names; by presenting charac* ters, wronged' by Tennyson, in a favourable light. This is unimportant, since one may prove one's indebtedness just ? mï? ostensibly revolting from an example as by slavishly following it. Not much more important is the fact that some of the best passages, e.g. our quotation from
.t'j"^/* have been ^tten. « not by the Tennyson of the Idylls at any rate by the Tennyson of 'Ulysses'. The real indebtedness is in the structure of the several sections towers of lyricism — sometimes in monologue, sometimes' in dialogue — built on scanty plots of narrative 'ground'm the use of the refrain; even in the so*called «pathetic faUacy Apart from the Morrisdike opening and the over* loaded descnpüons of the chief actor and actress, 'The bailing of the SwaUow' bears, in its dialogue, the imprint of Merlin and Vivien', Tennyson's meritorious version of the Samson and Delilah' theme. During the passionate monologue of Iseult at Tintagel* we Hsten to the chorus of the wind and the sea, but seem at the same time to perceive
4S) Compare:
My heart in me was held at restless rest (ibid p 101)
....a flameless light that glowed Starlike along night's dark and starry road....
But grief at heart burned in him like a fire **" P' ^
For hers and his own sorrowing sake.... (ibid d 46)
His soul took comfort even for joy to see ' The strong deep joy of living sun and sea....
(ibid. p. 118).



the ghosts of Tennyson's Mariana and Queen Guinevere, till all at once it flashes upon us that Swinburne — who, being no real pagan as Keats was, was always susceptible to the charms of that blessed and suggestive word sin,— while informing his verse with some more than Victorian passion, has likewise filled it as full of Victorian morahty as Tennyson, the Tennyson of 'The Last Tournament, could but have wished.



CHAPTER IX.
Browning, and the Reconciliation of Narrative and Lyricism.
§ 1. If we compare a poem — say, 'The Lady of Shalott' — which, though narrative in appearance, is virtually a lyric, with some undoubted gem of the truly narrative genre — say Burns's 'Tam o' Shanter' — we may, as we read both of them aloud, observe that the former poem invites the reader to chant, whereas the latter is pure speech, — animated speech, colourful speech, speech with great stirring capacity, but speech from beginning to end. And it would be tempting to fix upon this characteristic as a possible criterion, helping us in dividing the two genres, if we did not reflect that the same difference is to be found between two undoubted lyrics like Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' which positively demands being chanted, and Keats's 'Ode' to Autumn', which chanting, in our opinion, would spoil.
Browning, — though not devoid of the chanting tendency as witaess 'Through the Metidja to Abd*el*Kadr', 'Cavalier Tunes, and 'Abt Vogler', was pre*eminently a poet of speech. This does not mean that he always wrote 'conver* sational English'. It implies that his rhythms are based on the living rhythms of the spoken word; that his diction is never vaguely rhetorical, but as direct as can be; that his forcible metaphors are such as may naturally erop up in the course of agitated or impassioned conversation; and that his vocabulary is like the sheet seen in vision by St Peter on the housetop of Simon the tanher, that sheet con* taming all manner of creatures, none of them to be accounted unclean; a vocabulary in which stately Hebraisms trom the Bible jostle the technical terms of artists talking shop, and the raciest of colloquialisms, and homely phrases galore, and plenty of slang.
Also, the fact that Browning is pre*eminently a poet of speech, does not preclude occasional, or even frequent obscunty. We do not propose to go deep into this question'. Every Continental Lycéen of leaving age knows at least this about Browning: that he is difficult, and may, there* fore, m all conscience be neglected. When it comes to assigmng causes we need not put the blame either on the poets pedantry or on the soliloquizing habit that had



grown upon him. He did not soliloquize and he was not pedantic. But he took too much for granted on the part of his readers. Once or twice he addressed himself — as in 'Robert Browning, you writer of plays, Here 's a subject made to your hand!' — but not to teil himself stories. As a rule he addressed an imaginary audience consisting of his peers, of those that is who, being full as he was of volumes of out*of*the*way knowledge and 'forgotten lore', would readily understand allusions, and who, being quick*witted as he was, would without much difficulty grasp the mean* ing of an involved sentence. It is significant that the opening line of his obscurest work should run:
'Who will, may hear Sordello's story told.'
Sixteen years after the publication of 'Sordello', a year after the appearance of what is probably Browning's greatest book, 'Men and Women' (1855), his friend Carlyle — for* getting the theories of his other friend: Stuart Mill — still thought it necéssary to point out to him the wickedness of 'unintelligibüity': 'you are dreadfully difficult to understand, and that is really a sin. Admit the accusation: I testify to it; I found most of your pieces too hard of interpretation, and more than one (chiefly of the short kind) I had to read as a very enigma. I did make them all out, — all with about two insignificant exceptions; — but I do not know if many readers have got so far. Consider that case; it is actually
flagrant! A writing man is there to be understood: let
him lay that entirely to heart, and conform to it patiently; the sooner the better!' ('Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart Mill, John Sterling, and Robert Browning', pp.
298, 299.)
Carlyle was kind enough not to forbid Browning to use verse. 'I perceive it has grown to be your dialect ... .Con* tinue to write in verse, if you find it handier.' (op. cit. pp.
299, 300). Browning did find it 'handier', and continued to write in verse for many years longer. But he not only availed himself of Carlyle's 'permission' to do so, he also obeyed Carlyle's injunction 'to take up some one great subject tasking all his powers upon it for a long while, vowing to Heaven that he would be plain to mean capac* ities.' (op. cit. p. 300). He started writing 'The Ring and the Book'.



This does not mean that his withers were wrung. On page 299 of the collection of letters from which we have quoted we find the following note supplied by the editor, Dr. Alexander Carlyle; 'Referring to the charge of uninteU Ugibility or obscurity, Browning wrote, 27th November, 1868, to a friend, as follows: "I can have little doubt but that my writing has been, in the main, too hard for many I should have been pleased to communieate with: but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game of dominoes to an idle man. So perhaps on the whole I get my deserts and something over — not a crowd but a few I value more." — From a letter now in the British Museum.' Browning was not the first poet who, lacking a wide circle of readers, was fain to be content with 'fit audience though few'. We know, however, from his own utterances on the subject, that his conception of what a poet should be did not suffer from too much humility, that according to him a poet should not be satisfied with being a copyist of nature: he should be a creator; that he ought not to be a mere singer, or priest to an esoterie circle of Beauty*worshippers, but a leader, a ruler, a king of souls.
Whoever has had the patience and perseverance to plod his way through the mazes of 'Sordello' must have come upon many of these and similar utterances. We will make no attempt to rake them all together. A few must suffice. To Sordello's rival, Eglamor, Verse — with a capital V — was
.... a temple-worship vague and vast,
A ceremony that withdrew the last
Opposing bolt, looped back the lingering veil
Which hid the holy place — should one so frail
Stand there without such effort? or repine
That much was blank, uncertain at the shrine
He knelt before, till, soothed by many a rite,
The Power responded, and some sound or sight
Grew up, his own foreverl to be fixed
In rhyme, the beautiful, forever....
... .how he loved that art!
The calling marking him a man apart
From men — one not to care, take counsel for
Cold hearts, comfortless faces (Eglamor



Was neediest of his tribe) since verse, the gift. Was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift Without it, e'en content themselves with wealth And pomp and power, snatching a life by stealth. So Eglamor was not without his pride! The sorriest bat which cowers through noontide While other birds are jocund, has one time When moon and stars are blinded, and the prime Of earth is its to claim, nor find a peer;
And Eglamor was noblest poet here 
('Sordello', Bk II, 11. 197—232)
Nevertheless, this eminent troubadour is defeated in his poetical contest with Sordello, and slinks home, a beaten man, his revenge being this, that his successful rival soon wearies of his success, and even comes to despise himself for being flushed with it for a short while. Sordello knows that the mere touch of the surf ace of things cannot satisfy him; that he cannot help probing and grasping, bringing hid* den things to light, and he explains his point of view to another troubadour, Naddo, thus:
'Observe a pompion-twine afloat;
Pluck me one cup from off the castle-moat —
Along with cup you raise leaf, stalk and root,
The entire surface of the pool to boot
So could I pluck a cup, put in one song
A single sight, did not my hand, too strong,
Twitch in the last the rootstrings of the whole.
How should externals satisfy my soul?'
(ibid. 11. 775—782)
Naddo does not agree with him:
' you 're a bard, a bard past doubt,
And no philosopher; why introducé Crotchets like these? fine, surely, but no use In poetry — which still must be, to strike, Based upon common sense; there's nothing like Appealing to our nature!....
Would you have your songs endure?
Build on the human heart! — Why to be sure Yours is one sort of heart — but I mean theirs, Ours, every one's, the healthy heart one cares To build on!....'
(ibid. 11. 788—801)
Sordello does not take the advice. Other things he like* wise rejects, notably the too easily achieved 'completeness' of certain works of art whose 'creators' never strove to exceed the limitations imposed upon them by their special



talents. Browning is the poet of imperfection, of frustrated endeavour. 'A man's reach should exceed his grasp, 'says his Andrea del Sarto. 'On the earth the broken arcs, in the heavens a perfect round,' sings his Abt Vogler. In the same way Sordello, commenting on the work of his fellow trou* badour Eglamor, noted that the latter wrote his songs
With heart and soul and strength, for he believed Himself achieving all to be achieved By singer —
adding:
'in such songs you find alone Completeness,, judge the song and singer One And either purpose answered, his in it Or its in him: while from true works (to wit Sordello's dream-performances that will Be never more than dream) escapes there still Some proof the singer's proper life's beneath The life his song exhibits, this a sheath To that; a passion and a knowledge far Transcending these, majestic as they are, Smoulder; his lay was but an episode In the bard's life.'
('Sordello', Bk III, IL 601—ol4)
And afterwards, sitting in judgement on himself, he again insists that 'a poet must be earth's essential king' and that, if he has failed to achieve this, it was because he had squan* dered his spiritual patrimony 
'if I fail
T is not the royalty ye witness quail But one deposed who, caring not exert lts proper essence, trifled malapert
With accidents instead '
('Sordello', Bk V, 11. 48—493)
The lures of these theories are as obvious as their dangers. On the one hand it is only reasonable to insist that the achievement applauded by the public will fall short of the ideal that was before the poet's mind when he set himself to realize it in verse. On the other hand it is better that a poet should pay mere lip*service to theories that erect dire inevitability into an aesthetic (and moral) principle, — and forthwith proceed to ignore their existence altogether in the practice of his art, if such 'forgetfulness' can induce him to strive after the greatest measure of perfection that is within



his reach. As for Browning himself, he was only too seldom unaware of them, so that he readily acquiesced in imper* fections that he should have taken the trouble to avoid or to remove. When words are feit to be nothing but faulty sym* bols pointing to a perfection whose place is not on earth but in some Platonic 'heaven', a poet easily succumbs to the temptation of being satisfied with his first draught, when, as likely as not, the numerous blemishes in his work will make him the butt of Eglamor, the despised but conscientious artifex. Browning understood his own words. He knew very well what he set out to say. And so he came to believe that he had really said it. Since words are at best the most im* perfect of tools, why should he undertake all the weary labours of the file? Filing, polishing, remettre sur le métier, as Boileau has it, — that was all very well for people who, having little to say, had plenty of time to do it carefully.
But he had so much to say And judging by the effect
his work, such as it was, had on himself, he could not help thinking its evocative power adequate ,since it enabled him» self at any rate to visualize his own ideal.
Are we again confronted by Mill's theory of the poet's soul soliloquizing? Hardly, since a creator consciously pro* nouncing his imperfect creation 'sufficiently good' is on a different plane from a poet abandoning himself to his reye* rie. But how can a sohloquist even of this description in* fluence, not a chosen few, a select circle of kindred spirits, but his generation? How can he be, as Browning desired, a king of souls, when his 'artistic conscience' — or lack of it — permits him at most to be some sort of Delphian oracle, needing priests to expound him to the multitude that can understand the parable of the Good Samaritan — or, for that matter, Wordsworth's 'Daffodils by Ullswater' or 'To the Cuckoo' — at first hearing?
Anyhow, and apart from Mill's theory, here we find the theories professed by Browning himself in open conflict with tendencies that must have been in him from the begin* ning and were fostered by the 'literary life' he led. Sepa* rated from his own people; reading books, English and foreign, old and new, yellow and white; sitting at his writing*desk every day, composing poetry; conversing in English with only a few literary people, conversing in Italian with the people among whom he had found a home; —



perhaps not even conversing, only watching; — surely, every circumstance conspired, not only to separate Browning from his audience but to deprive him of the very sense of address* ing one. In this respect Wordsworth and Tennyson were privileged above him. They had each — like him — their literary friends; they were also — as he must have been — on speaking terms with plenty of 'social inferiors'. But the latter, whether Cumberland beggars or Lincolnshire farmers, were English, and helped to keep the sense of having an English audience alive in them, so that they were habitus ated, in spite of their solitary broodings, to suit their words and sentences to the receptivity of their hearers. Whereas Browning, cut off from all intercourse with English car? penter, roadmender and dairymaid, resembled a plant transferred, without its root, to a vase. Neither letters nor newspapers can make up for such isolation, and the postal service was far less perfect then than it is now. Such a poet may 'stand and watch the [Italian] cobbler at his trade,
The man who slices lemons into drink, The coffee*roaster's brazier, and the boys That volunteer to help him turn its winch,'
he cannot hope ever to be a king of souls, and must be content to be a purveyor of intellectual treats to 'superior persons'.
That Browning 'had it in him' to be something else is proved first of all by a small number of narrative poems in which he remembers he is addressing an audience and f orgets himself in his story. Such a poem is 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin', addressed to a little boy, and worthy, in its high spirits and colourful exuberance, of a place in the imme* diate neighbourhood of Burns's 'Tam o'Shanter'. Seldom, if ever, have Browning's miraculous riming powers stood him in such good stead and helped him to score such an unqualified success 
There was a rustling that seemed like a bustling Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling, Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering, Little hands clapping, and little tongues chattering. And, like fowls in a farm»yard when barley is scattering, Out came the children running. All the little boys and girls, With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,



And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter 
When Browning wrote this he was a young man. But he remained quite capable of similar feats, and in 1870 wrote 'Hervé Riel':
On the Sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety«two, Did the English fight the French, — woe to France!
And the thirtyrfirst of May, helter»skelter through the blue,
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue, Came crowding ship on ship to Saint»Malo on the Rance,
With the English fleet in view 
But the number of genuine stories of which Robert Browning in propria persona is the narrator, is small. 'Sor* dello', an ostensible story, consists for a very great part of lyrical (and other) digressions. Full of subjectivity from start to finish, an irresistible temptation to commentators, a constant danger*signal to the ordinary lover of poetry, it could never have held any audience, and much the same description will fit Tacchiarotto', which was written thirty* six years afterwards. Had the poet learned nothing in respect of his art in all the intervening period? And yet the long interval between 'Sordello' and Tacchiarotto' had seen the birth of many charming — and as a rule not so very difficult — poems which, whether called 'Dramatic Lyrics' or 'Dramatic Romances', were often undoubted stories. Can it have been the form chosen — or stumbled on — by Browning that, by putting a muchmeeded check on his ultra*subjectivist — some critics would call it ultra*roman* tic — expansiveness, enabled or compelled him to stick to his subject and hold the reader captive?
It would seem so. The form of the 'Dramatic Romances and Lyrics' was not entirely novel, and Browning may have owed a debt here to a man far beneath him in range, depth, creative power, and poetic vision, to wit the French chan* sonnier Béranger, whose 'Vieux Caporal' — to mention only one out of many — was a veritable dramatic romance, with a central figure addressing an audience, each successive stanza marking a new stage and developing a special aspect of the story:
En avant! partez, camarades, L'arme aü bras, le fusil chargé. J'ai ma pipe et vos embrassades;



Venez me donner mon congé. J'eus tort de viellir au service; Mais pour vous tous, jeunes soldata, J'étais un père a 1'exercice.
Conscrits, au pas;
Ne pleurez pas,
Ne pleurez pas, Au pas, au pas, au pas, au pas!
Un morveux d'officier m'outrage;
Je lui fends.... II vient d'en guérir.
On me condamne, c'est 1'usage:
Le vieux caporal doit mourir.
Poussé d'humeur et de rogomme,
Rien n'a pu retenir mon bras;
Puis, moi, j'ai servi le grand homme....
Qui Ia>bas sanglote et regarde? Eh! c'est Ia veuve du tambour. En Russie, a 1'arrièresgarde, J'ai porté son fils nuit et jour....
Morbleu! ma pipe s'est ét ein te.
Non, pas encore.... Allons, tant mieuxl
Nous allons entrer dans 1'enceinte;
Ca, ne me bandez pas les yeux....
Béranger, who showed himself a great artist in the dramatic arrangement of his chansons, — if in little else, — was a man of the people, and his art is a lineal descendant of the old street baüads, purporting to give the career and 'last words' of some notorious criminal; a genre which has left its mark on other literatures likewise. In this connection we may cite 'Die Giftmischerin' by the German poet Adel* bert von Chamisso (1828):
Dies hier der Block, und dorten klafft die Gruft Lasst einmal noch mich atmen diese Luft Und meine Leichenrede selber halten. Was schauet ihr mich an so grausenvoll? Ich führte Krieg, wie jeder thut und solt,
Gen feindliche Gewalten. Ich that nur eben, was ihr alle thut, Nur besser; drum, begehret ihr mein Blut,
So thut ihr gut....
We may also point to poems like Goethe's 'Verschiedene Empfindungen an einem Platze' — in which 'das Madchen', 'der Jüngling', 'der Schmachtende' and 'der Jager', each say their say —, to William Cowper's 'Verses Supposed to Be



Written by Alexander Selkirk, during His Solitary Abode in the Island of Juan Fernandez', and — to Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner', which in places is as dramat* i» as can be. But these and similar precursors do not suffice to account for Browning's whole*hearted adoption of the form, the chief factors determining his choice of it being probably his long if unsuccessful preoccupation with the stage, and — a very natural wish to shuffle off responsibil* ity for occasional views and sentiments that would be pretty sure to displease contemporary critics of the school of Jeffrey, Gifford and Lockhart. We have seen how Clough's 'Bothie' was vilified as late as the year 1849. The method, however, served Browning in this respect likewise: that it enabled him to disown, in after life, opinions that had for years and years been acclaimed by devoted admirers. In a 'Letter Dedicatory' appended by the poet Robert Buchanan to 'The Outcast: a Rhyme for the Time' (1891) the latter tells us (on p. 198): 'I well remember the amaze* ment and concern of the late Mr. Browning when I informed him, on one occasion, that he was an advocate of Christian Theology, nay an essentially Christian teacher and preacher. In the very face of Mr. Browning's masterly books, which certainly support the opinion then advanced, I hereby affirm and attest that the writer regarded that expression as an impeachment and a slight. I therefore put the question categorically, 'Are you not, then, a Christian?" He imme* diately thundered, "No!"
On the whole we incline towards the assumption that it was mere chance, or, rather, successful experimenting, that led Browning — who, though a baf fled dramatist, feit an irresistible dramatic impulse — to the adoption of the dramatic method in narrative. The spiritual isolation of Mill's 'soliloquizing' lyrist was evidently a thing which he strove — no matter whether consciously or sub*consciously — to escape. If he must needs be a poet of the individual, he wanted to be the interpreter of the greatest possible number of individuals. And his efforts met with their due reward. The fact that a poet should be able 'to slip into another's skin', becoming another's spokesman, telling an* other's tale, is, no doubt, a miracle in itself, although, teste Shakespeare, not without plenty of precedents. But in Browning's case another miracle happened in that



his imagination could so often get the better of his cleverness and make the poet forget the constant itch he feit to be reasoning and holding forth for the mere pleasure of reasoning and holding forth. Though we are not concerned here with the self*revelations of his Andreas and Lippis and Blougrams, our remark applies to those subsdramatic studies likewise. But as a 'narrator by deputy' Browning scores his greatest successes with such poems as 'Incident of the French Camp', 'How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix', 'The Flight of the Duchess' and 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'. 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' is not fuller of colour and verve than these stories in verse are. But there is a difference in kind: instead of Browning's own reactions to incident and situations or of Browning's own viewpoint and angle of vision, they give some imaginary story*teller's, whose character is depicted indirectly as the tale develops and proceeds, and who has in some cases been an interested spectator of the occurrences he describes, in other cases one of the actors, and who in 'Childe Roland' is the hero him* self. How we can visualize and 'sense' all of them: Napo* leon's former aidesdescamp, cultured and polite, most likely pensioned off, but still spiek and span and every inch a soldier in his civilian clothes, who, when the 'incident' hap* pened was as devoted to his emperor as the young orderly 'whose breast was all but shot in two', but who, being accustomed to the emperor's immediate presence, remained critically observant through it all; — Parma's hard*bitten trooper in his seventeenth century jackboots, mindful of his message, mindful of his horse, allowing not a feature of the landscape to pass by unnoticed, and, though doubtless suf* fering from intense thirst, reserving his 'last measure of wine' for the moment of real need; — the old Moldavian huntsman, bald*headed, grey*mustachio'd, better educated than his fellows though a slow penman, full of falconry and horsemanship; for all his humorous twinkles under his bushy brows, still in love with his departed Jacynth, and still worshipping the young, unhappy Duchess, his Venus Urania that was; and for all his sovereign contempt for the ugly, spiteful old Duchess and her mediaevalizing son, proud of the House and the property, with the pride of an old retainer 



Ours is a great wild country:
If you climb to our castle's top,
I don't see where your eye can stop;
For when you've passed the corn-field country,
Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed,
And sheepsrange leads to cattle^tract,
And cattle-tract to open-chase,
And open-chase to the very base
Of the mountain, where, at a funeral pace,
Round about, solemn and slow,
One by one, row after row,
Up and up the pine-trees go,
So, like black priests up, and so
Down the other side again
To another greater, wilder country,
That's one vast red drear burnt-up plain,
Branched thro' and thro' with many a vein
Whence iron's dug, and copper's dealt;
Look right, look left, look straight before, —
Beneath they mine, above they smelt,
Copper-ore and iron-ore,
And forge and furnace mould and melt,
And so on, more and ever more,
Till, at the last, for a bounding belt,
Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore,
— And the whole is our Duke's country!
Whatever the part played by the narrator in the occur* rences he describes, — whether hero or fellow*actor or interested spectator, — each tale told is, apart from its obvious content, the record of a personal — often of a spiritual — experience. The story provides the melody, so to say, the personal experience the chords. Here, if anywhere, is the reconciliation of narrative and lyric, a fact of which Browning was conscious, — and this very consciousness led him, in subsequent editions, to a somewhat arbitrary division of his shorter poems into 'Dramatic Lyrics' and 'Dramatic Romances'. We fail to understand why 'Childe Roland' should belong to the second category, and 'How They Brought the Good News' to the first
One of the most splendid examples of lyric and narrative reconciled is furnished by the long poem called 'Christmas Eve', the central figure of which is a 'superior person', who, 'on the Christmas*Eve of 'Forty*nine', after first taking shelter in the 'lath*and*plaster entry' of a dingy Methodist chapel, and being stared at by each new arrival, — humo* rously described, — 'plucks up heart to enter' and 'crosses the threshold's magie pentacle' 



'I very soon had enough of it.
The hot smell and the human noises,
And my neighbour's coat, the greasy cuff of it,
Were a pebble-stone that a child's hand prizes
Compared with the pig-of-lead-like pressure
Of the preaching-man's immense stupidity,
As he poured his doctrine forth, full measure,
To meet his audience's avidity.
You needed not the wit of the Sybil
To guess the cause of it all, in a twinkling 
No sooner had our friend an inkling
Of treasure hid in the Holy Bible 
That he handled it so, in fine irreverence,
As to hug the Book of books to pieces:
And, a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance,
Not improved by the private dog's ears and creases'
Having clpthed his own soul with, he 'd fain seen equippedyours -
Jso tossed you again your Holy Scriptures.
But the flock sat on, divinely flustered,
Sniffing, methought, its dew of Hermon,
With such content in every snuffle,
As the devil inside us loves to ruffle.
My old fat woman purred with pleasure,
And thumb round thumb went twirling faster
While she, to his periods keeping measure,
Maternally devoured the pastor 
'T was too provoking!
My gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it, And saying, like Eve when she plucked the apple, I wanted a taste, and now there's enough of it," I flung out of the little chapel.'
'Christmas Eve' is speech. We do not know the collocutor anymore than we know who it is that «Childe Roland' addresses. But addressed someone is, for when the speaker (and central figure) tells of his experience that same night m Rome before St. Peter's, he responds to the incredulous and scornful looks - perhaps words — levelled at him,
'Liar and dreamer in your teethl p,
I, the sinner that speak to you,
Was in Rome this night, and stood, and knew
Both this and more!' (section X).
_ Even more explicit is the Moldavian of 'The Flight of the Duchess, for he begins:
'You 're my friend:
I was the man the Duke spoke to;
I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke, too;
io, here 's the tale from beginning to end,
My friend!'



Nav more, the consciousness of addressing an auditor, so far from hampering the effusions of the old huntsman, becomes to him a source of inspiration. Compare section XI, where the young, neglected duchess is expectedto play a somewhat theatrical part on one of his mediaevahzing hunting*expeditions (the italics are ours):
The Duke put this question, "The Duke's part provided,
"Had not the Duchess some share in the business." ....
And, after much laying of heads together,
Somebody's cap got a notable feather
By the announcement with proper unction
That he had discovered the lady's function;
Since ancient authors held this tenet
"When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege,
"Let the dame of the Castle prick forth on her jennet,
"And with water to wash the hands of her hege
"In a clean ewer with a fair toweling, ^
"Let her preside at the disembowelling.
Now, my friend. if you had so little religion
As to catch a hawk, some falcontlanner,
And thrust her broad wings like a banner
Into a coop for a vulgar pigeon;
And if day by day, and week by week,
You cut her claws, and sealed her eyes,
And clipped her wings, and tied her beak,
Would it cause you any great surprise
lf when you decided to give her an airing
You found she needed a little preparing?
— I say, should you be such a curmudgeon,
lf she clung to the perch, as to take it in dudgeon?
This is speech, even coUoquial speech, of the "I;P«tsits*°: vou sir' kind. Yet it is undoubted poetry, full of fire and colour and imaginative rush. Nay more, it is poetry for the veT reason that it is coUoquial. It is idle to separate, as Mill aoes, poetry from eloquence. To admit he: curious grip the broken accents of what we may call /altenng poetry' sometimes have on us, is not to deny to etoquence the right to rank as poetry when it is really poetical and not merely rhetorical. Would a solüoquy have been better^ sincerer in this case? Would it have furmshed us with 'purer' poetry? It is true, when a man wants to solüoquize he doesPnot put on his topAat for the purpose. But does he do so when he wants to impress or persuade — not a vestry or a council, but a friend? , Most souls can be unlocked only by the knowledge that



another sou is near, sympathetic and attentive. And from what precedes this truth would seem to emerge: that the strenger such knowledge is, the more fullddooded the result* mg poetry will be, to the extent even of making an undis* puted masterpiece like 'The Lady of Shalott' look a trifle anasmic when put side by side with it
But we must insist that the above*d'iscussed poems repre* sent Browning s higkwater mark as a reconcüer of lyricism with narrative. 'The Ring and the Book', though a work on r<nf-Tre ™los?al scale- not infrequently on a higher plane (Christmas Eve excepted), and, not without cause, written about and commented on ad infinitum, offers only some specimens of the genre, namely the 'versions' of Capon* sacchi, Pompiha, and Guido, and opens no new vistas as regards Brownings methods. With a work like 'The Inn Album our enquiry has nothing to do. It is not a story, but a play, larded with Iengthy stage*directions that seem to anücipate Bernard Shaw's. 'Turf and Towers', though found! ed on a story, cannot be termed a story either. And such SfiSSTJ8 °f ?rowr£s afte™ath as 'Ivan IvanovS f\~?l£i • 01 °n the PrivileSe of Burial', and 'Donald' though lyrico^narrative, do not call for special discussion
8 4 üsbert Burdett makes a curious slip in his 'The Brownings by saying (op. cit. p. 287) that Browning 'remains ïhTflll • ï y u0m-n0t°ne has ventured to imitate', whereas Jr wCtJS at ïe ?as been imitated repeatedly, both durins his h e.tune and after Sometimes, as in the case of Tenny^ son, imitating' is hardly the word, since 'The May Queen' heard not overhe d> by her mother _
that Browning d,d not invent the form he was to make so particularly his own, and that 'Rizpah', separated from 'The May Queen' by half a century, might have been written even had Browning never existed. But it is a significant fact that the Tnesias' volume of 1885, dedicated «to my good friend
potms^ fn'T1? . QUite 8 bunch o? na™«ve
poems in the jatters manner, poems like 'The Wreek'
tWPtLr'iand Tr°^OW'' alth°Ugh " must be observed that the lastsmentioned poem is in dialect, a thing which
™?Zrt' L°ni°ne^: and exiIe' never attempted It 's dlr^VT1^ that,-the ^^arrative form, which hhï dered Browning s peculiarities from running riot, making the artist in him appear at his best exactly where his freedom



was most circumscribed, did away with many Tennysonian mannerisms Hkewise, and improved the 'pace' of his poems on more than one occasion:
But if sin be sin, not inherited fate, as many will say, Mv sin to my desolate little one found me at sea on a day, When her orphan waü came borne in the shriek of a growing wind, And a voice rang out in the thunders of Ocean and Heaven
'Thou hast sinn'd' . And down in the cabin were we, for the towermg crest of the tides Plunged on the vessel and swept in a cataract off from her sides, And ever the great storm grew with a howl and a hootof the blast In the rigging, voices of heil - then came «jf ^
'Vane's Story', written in 1864 by James Thomson, whose 'Weddah and Om*eUBonain' we discussed in our seventn chapter, shows Browning's influence unmistakabry. ine story is told by the central figure to a friend who finds hun in bed at a very unusual hour
When a splash of fierce red From the sunset made strange The street's opposite range 
The friend tells the reader that Vane looked pale and queer and that his story was incredible,
'But his speech calm and clear, And his voice sweet and strong, So swayed me ere long, That I almost or quite Believed him that night.'
As a spiritual experience the poem is Browning A retours, pagan or agnostic where he is Christian, and full of irrever* ences, of the sort beloved by German Herne and Dutch Multatuli. Vane is visited by his long*dead ladydove, who reproaches him with spiritual slackness, and calls him to account generally. He defends himself, alleging boddy decay, alleging, moreover, that his place is not with the sheep but with the goats:
"I half remember, years ago,
Fits of despair that maddened woe,
Frantic remorse, intense self-scorn.
And yearnings harder to be borne
Of utter loneliness forlorn;
What passionate secret prayers I prayedl



What futile firm resolves I made! As well a thorn might pray to be Transformed into an olive-tree; As well a weevil might determine To grow a farmer hating vermin...."
He proceeds to confess a Baudelairean ennui:
'The same old stolid hills and leas,
The same old stupid patiënt trees,
The same old ocean blue and green,
The same sky cloudy or serene;
The old two-dozen hours to run
Between the settings of the sun,
The old 'three hundred sixty-five
Dull days to every year alive;
Old stingy measure, weight and rule,
No margin left to play the fooi;
The same old way of getting born
Into it naked and forlorn,
The same old way of creeping out
Through death's low door for lean and stout;
Same men with the old hungry needs,
Puffed up with the old windy creeds;
Old toil, old care, old worthless treasures,
Old gnawing sorrows, swindling pleasures:
The cards are shuffled to and fro,
The hands may vary somewhat so,
The dirty pack's the same we know
Played with long thousand years ago;
Played with and lost with still by Man, 
Fate marked them ere the game began; I think the only thing that's strange Is our illusion as to change "
But a miracle is wrought:
'Her royal kiss was on my brow
A burning ruby, burning now
As then, and burning evermore;
A Star of Love above the roar
And fever of this life's long war:
And suddenly my brain was bright
With glowing fire and dancing light '
They go to a ball, a humble tradesmen's affair, where the lady's beauty attracts caddish Brown (who is promptly sent about his business), whereas Vane's own transformation or transfiguration is not lost upon good*natured Jones, who tells him



'....you are half as tall again,
And stately as a King of Men;
And in the prime of health and youth,
Younger by twenty years in sooth;
Your face, the pale and sallow, glows
As fresh as any morning rose;
Your voice rings richly as a bell,
Resonant as a trump et-s well;
Your dull and mournful djreamy eyes
Now dazzle, burn, and mesmerise....'
But as Jones is a kindred spirit it is not difficult to make him realize how matters stand. A last rapturous waltz follows, danced to a music of delicious sighs, impassioned but dreamlike, changing presently into a more impetuous stream of melody, with keen stars listening as thrush suc*
ceeds nightingale, and skylark replaces thrush And then
suddenly — silence:
Never a song in all the world 1 But low clouds floating soft and furled, And rivers winding far away, And ripples weaving faëry spray, And mists far-curving swelling round Dim twilight hills that soon are drowned, And breezes stirring solemn woods, And seas embracing solitudes....
And his love leaves him, vanishes, after promising that they shall soon be re*united. 'The next week he died, and thus ended his story.'
The poem is, we repeat, Browning a rebours, but from first to last it is an example of the Browningian manner at its best, with the same aU*embracing vocabulary, the same riming«power, the same range from easy and racy colloqui* alism to high poetry and with unforgettable lines like the last one quoted by us. But its cheap irrelevancies, which must have appeared the height of wickedness half a century ago, provoke yawns now, and will always prevent it from becoming more widely known and appreciated.
§ 3. Another notable narrative poem in Browning's manner, Rossetti's 'A Last Confession', we may pass by; likewise certain more or less direct imitations of special poems, e.g. of 'How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix'; such as 'Kit Carson's Ride', by the American poet Joaquin Miller, and 'From the Wreek', by Adam Lind* say Gordon, the scène of which is laid in Australia. The



method had come to stay. A new application, which left it just as it was, came with the dramatic narratives of T. E. Brown (e.g. 'Betsy Lee') and of R. Buchanan (e.g. 'The Scaith o'Bartle'), who went for their subject*matter to the common people. For a new development of the method we must wait till the year 1912, which saw the publication of Wilfrid Gibson's 'Fires', in three slender volumes.
This poet had, until then, confined his attention chiefly to the romantic lyric and the drama in verse. He had also written a few narrative romances in the orthodox manner, and, only two years previously, 'Akra the Slave', which is subjective in treatment, but somewhat incongruously so. Written in irregular lines, rimeless, and based on the rhythms of the spoken language, it makes the impression of rather stilted speech, — but we never get to know who is the recipiënt of Akra's forty pages of reminiscential confi* dences, and as a 'soliloquy' it fails to convince us:
He thought to see me tremble
And totter as an oar*snapt reed,
When he spake death to me —
My courage, toppled in the dust,
Even as the head of cactus
The camelskeeper slashes
That his beasts may browse, unscathed,
The succulent, wounded green.
He thought to have me, broken,
And grovelling at his feet;
Mouthing and mumbling to his sandabties,
In stammering dread of death —
Aye! even as a king,
Who, having from death's hand,
Received his crown and kingdom,
For ever treads in terror of the hour
When death shall jog his elbow,
Twitch the purple from his shoulders,
And claim again the borrowed crown.
But, little need have I to fear
The crouching, lean campdollower,
Unto whose eversgaping maw,
Day after day, I flung
The spoils of bow and arrow,
Ere I was taken captive —
I, who have often, at my mother's breast,
Awakened in the nighMime,
To see death leering on me from the cavesmouth,
A gaunt and slinking shape
That snuffed the dying embers,
Blotting out the friendly stars 



It is a remarkable feat for a man to remember the things he saw when, at night, he slept at his mother's breast, — but apart from such considerations we must insist that the poet was ükadvised in using the rhythms, if not exactly the language, of speech for these lyrical effusions, which seem to require verse of the most orthodox kind, verse precluding any inquiry whether a man 'soliloquizing' ever uses spake instead of spoke. Anyhow, if fresh from the reading of 'Akra the Slave', we open 'Fires', we shall rub our eyes with astonishment. Were these poems written by the same hand?
Twenty*one simple stories in verse, some of them told by a 'central figure', others by a witness, and just a few by 'the author himself'. Two or three of the first*mentioned kind are hardly distinguishable from Wordsworthian lyrics — one in fact, 'The Dancing Seal', is another version of 'Daffodils by Ullswater' — and all of them are about simple English folk, the sort of people that Browning either could not write about, — or did not care to; and 'unromantic' people, too, except for just a few poachers and lighthouse* keepers.
Let us first consider a poacher's adventure, told by the hero himself, viz. 'The Hare':
My hands were hot upon a hare, Halbstrangled, struggling in a snare — My knuckles at her warm wincUpipe — When suddenly, her eyes shot back, Big, fearful, staggering and black: And, ere I knew, my grip was slack; And I was clutching empty air,
Half«mad, halfsglad at my lost luck 
When I awoke beside the stack.
'T was just the minute when the snipe. As though cloclcwakened, every jack, An hour ere dawn, dart in and out The misbwreaths rilling syke and slack, And flutter wheeling round about, And drumming out the Summer night. I lay starsgazing yet a bit; Then, chillyskinned, I sat upright, To shrug the shivers from my back; And, drawing out a straw to suck,
My teeth nipped through it at a bite 
The liveliest lad is out of pluck An hour ere dawn — a tame cock»sparrow — When cold stars shiver through his marrow, And wet mist soaks his mother>wit



But, as the snipe dropped, one by one; And one by one the stars blinked out; I knew 't would only need the sun To send the shudders right about; And, as the clear East faded white, I watched and wearied for the sun — The jolly, welcome, friendly sun — The sleepy sluggard of a sun That still kept snoozing out of sight, Though well he knew the night was done.... And, after all, he caught me dozing, And leapt up, laughing, in the sky Just as my lazy eyes were closing: And it was good as gold to lie Fulldength among the straw, and feel The day wax warmer every minute....
Presently perceiving, in his immediate neighbourhood, a hare — 'with long lugs cocked and eyes astare' — washing itself, he follows the creature, not with any murderous in* tentions, but simply, with a kind of superstition, accepting its guidance. And it leads him, up hill and down dale, to a Gypsy van, where he is hospitably entertained and drowses in the glare and heat of a big fire, when a sudden apparition reminds him of his dream:
'I saw a girl with eyes astare
That looked in terror o'er my head:
And, all at once, my courage failed me 
For now again, and soresadread,
My hands were hot upon a hare,
That struggled, strangling in the snare 
Then once more as the girl stood clear,
Before me — quaking cold with fear
I saw the hare look from her eyes 
And when, at last, I turned to see
What held her scared, I saw a man —
A fat man with dull eyes aleer —
Within the shadow of the van:
And I was on the point to rise
To send him spinning 'mid the wheels,
And twist his neck between his heels,
And stop his leering grin with mud 
And would have done it in a tick 
When, suddenly, alive with fright,
She started, with red, parted lips,
As though she guessed we 'd come to grips,
And turned her black eyes full on me 
And, as I looked into their light,
My heart forgot the lust of fight,
And something shot me to the quick,
And ran like wildfire through my blood '



He has fallen in love, and, lying by the fire that night he cannot sleep for thinking of the girl. And then he sees her standing
on the little stair
Outside the van, with listening air —
And, in her eyes, the hunted hare 
And then, I saw her slip away,
A bundie underneath her arm,
Without a single glance at me.
I lay a moment wondering,
My heart a»thump like anything,
Then, fcaring she should come to harm, I rose, and followed speedily
Where she had vanished in the night
And, as she heard my step behind,
She started, and stopt dead with fright: Then blundered on as if struck blind:
And now as I caught up with her,
Just as she took the moorland track,
I saw the hare's eyes, big and black 
She has escaped from the unwelcome attentions of 'Old fat Pete', but the young poacher's company — and love — she is soon resigned to accept, and in the moonlit night, 'among the honey*scented heather', they wander on, 'a lad and lass alone with life.'
The poem has a spontaneous look. The thoughts and afterthoughts, fancies and 'underscorings' erop up apparently with the irrepressible force of Browning's 'arguments' and alleged 'motivations'. The verse, too, is apparently of the happy*goducky kind; sometimes a line is left rimeless, oftener the rime occurs at a distance where it is barely perceived as such; not infrequently there are as many as three or four lines riming, especially when the situation bears dwelling on a little. Yet there is much more art behind this apparent artlessness than a superficial reader would be inclined to believe. It is true, the lyricomarrative form — given an unsophisticated poacher as the 'vocal' hero — will of itself promote simplicity, simplicity as regards both verse*structure and diction. If it was wrong of Dr. Johnson to make his little fishes talk like whales, it would be equally reprehensible for a poet aiming at verisimiUtude to couch homely occurrences in the Üves of the poor in highly* wrought verse with fardetched and gorgeous imagery. Yet the gorgeous element is not altogether absent, but it is



simple georgeousness, a touch of colour here, a splash of sunlight there, no more than that. And if the diction is not yet entirely free from literary forms, such as o'er and ne'er, it represents an enormous advance on that of Akra the Slave', and besides, we should be wary of labelling as literary what is perhaps merely provincial. Browning, a 'St. Peter' of poetry, had acted, whether he was aware of it or not, on Victor Hugo's maxim, 'Plus de mot sénateur, plus de mot roturier.' Gibson, forced by his subject*matter and his growing sense of realism to reject English mots sénateurs, may be said to have enriched his vocabulary with dialect forms in order to repair the losses. He is a native of Hexham in Northumberland, and as he proceeds on his way, next discarding his o'ers and ne'ers, he retains his Northumbrian aughts and naughts, and such forms as astare, adaze, astrain, asgiggle, which, mere archaisms with Browning, are provincialisms with him. This is to say that his diction — and in this he resembles countless other poets, and of the best — is a studied diction, for all its simplicity. But apart from this, there is in several of his poems 'pre* meditated art' in the effective recurrence of some motif. In the poem we have just discussed it is the image of a strangled hare; in 'The Machine' it is the glaring yellows and blues and reds dancing before the tired eyes of the colour*printer who is the central figure; in 'The Crane', which — though containing a story for whoever cares to piece things together — is more of a lyric than any of the other poems, there are two interchanging motifs, the 'patter* ing' of running sheep symbolizing the mother's pathetic past, 'the biggest crane on earth', easily lifting two hundred tons and upwards, representing the 'romantic escape' of the crippled son doomed to lie for ever on his back in a garret. The use of these motifs recalls now the structure of a piece of music, now the arrangement of a fresco; and if 'taking thought' in such matters is considered praiseworthy in painter and musician, it should be held equally laudable in a poet, even if by doing so he interferes with the free course of his reveries, and forces what was chaotic into a mould of his liking.
An important point to be observed here is: that of Gibson's 'dramatic' narratives it is nowhere possible to visualize the recipiënt; in fact we may often wonder whether



there is any other listener than the reader himself. It was perhaps because he was a writer of many miniature plays, whicht gave full scope to his gift for writing conversation, — that in his stories he willingly forewent the advantages of the subdramatic form, signalized by us in discussing Browning, so that instead of something heard he gave us things overheard. In his verse*dedication to a later volume of 'stories' — 'Livelihood': Dramatic Reveries, 1917, — he himself avows as much:
Audrey, these men and women I have known I have brought together in a book for you, So that my child some day when she is grown May know the friendly folk her father knew.
Wondering how fathers can be so absurd, Perhaps you'U take it idly from the shelves, And, reading, hear, as once I overheard, These men and women talking to themselves 
(our italics.)
Gibson's development of Browning's manner has landed him — in Browning's abandoned position, viz. the apparent soliloquy. His stories still represent a reconciliation of narrative and lyric, but only in this respect: that Gibson, having 'got into another man's skin', realizes the thoughts and feelings of his impersonation, and interprets them to us, using, in the way interpreters have, a kind of oratio obliqua throughout. At least, such is the immediate impres* sion. It cannot be the whole truth, since the imposition of order upon chaos necessarily persists.
One of the purest specimens of the genre — not the one that is most poetical, but the one that is, in our opinion, most of a piece — is 'The Drove Road!, the central figure of which is a North Country drover. With its homely talk flavoured with provincialisms and its total lack of any word or passage that is consciously poetical, it is, except for its rime, as unlike traditional poetry as can possibly be, but convinces and enthralls from beginning to end:
T was going to snow — 't was snowing! Curse his luck!
And fifteen mile to travel — here was he
With nothing but an empty pipe to suck,
And half a flask of rum — but that would be
More welcome later on. He 'd had a drink
Before he left; and that would keep him warm



A tidy while: and 't would be good to think He 'd something to fall back on if the storm Should come to much. You never knew with snow. A sup of rain he didn't mind at all,
But snow was different with so far to go 
Full fifteen mile, and not a house of calL
Ay, snow was quite another story, quite —
Snow on these fell-tops with a north-east wind
Behind it blowing steadily with a bite
That made you feel that you were stript and skinned.
And those poor beasts — and they just off the boat
A day or so, and hardly used to land —
Still dizzy with the sea, their wits afloat.
When they first reached the doek, they scarce could stand,
They 'd been so joggled. It 's gey bad to cross,
After a long day's jolting in the train,
Thon Irish Channel, always pitch and toss —
And heads or tails, not much for them to gain!
And then the market, and the throng and noise
Of yapping dogs: and they stung mad with fear,
Welted with witches by those senseless boys —
He 'd like to dust their jackets! 
How in the blizzard he loses his beasts, and how, after a narrow escape of getting lost himself, he picks them up again, running into them in the pitchy dark as they stand still, sniffing a human body in the snow, — all this we are told listening to the drover's thoughts, which we hear from beginning to end, and which make the impression of a story, thanks to that compromise between direct and reported speech, the English oratio obliqua. The reconciliation between lyricism and narrative can 'no further go': the story is told by means of the apparent soliloquy, which is, in fact, identical with the story.



CHAPTER X.
Masefield, and the Return to Pure Poetical Narrative.
The present Laureate has been a teller of tales, both in prose and in verse, these twenty years past, and a thorough survey of his narrative poetry alone would require a volume. What motives determined Masefield's choice of medium in each separate case, it would be impossible to make out. As likely as not, it was mere want of change, for the sub* ject matter of prose romances like 'Lost Endeavour' or 'Captain Margaret' would have been suitable enough for treatment in ierza rima or in Spenserian stanzas; and a novel in verse like 'the Widow in the Bye Street' might, if retold in prose, gain rather than lose in the process. Besides, each new narrative poem was, as a rule, composed to a different metrical pattern, a fact which makes our conjecture a virtual certainty.
Masefield is a professed worshipper of beauty, and fond of using that word as if it denoted a real entity, a habit which, whether it commands our approval or no, would at any rate lead us to credit him with artistic convictions of a kind. But most readers of English know by this time that he is by no means an impeccable artist. Indeed, his sins as an author are often so glaring as to set discourteous readers wondering whether he has an 'artistic conscience'. And yet he is a genuine poet; he has 'the root of the matter in him', and something more; and his power of 'vision', though working intermittently, is, in its moments of activity, as great as anybody's 
A gipsy's camp was in the copse,
Three felted tents, with beehive tops,
And round black marks where fires had been,
And one old waggon painted green,
And three ribbed horses wrenching grass,
And three wild boys to watch me pass,
And one old woman by the fire
Hulking a rabbit warm from wire.
I loved to see the horses bait.
I feit I walked at Heaven's gate,
That Heaven's gate was opened wide
Yet still the gipsies camped outside.
The waste souls will prefer the wild,
Long after life is meek and mild.
Perhaps when man has entered in



His perfect city free from sin The campers will come past the walls With old lame horses full of galis, And waggons hung about -with withies, And burning coke in tinkers' stithies, And see the golden town, and choose,
And think the wild too good to lose 
And camp outside, as these camped then, With wonder at the entering men 
This mental experience of Saul Kane on his way to rege* neration is one of the jewels which, in conjunction with much that is merely paste, are held together by the rather unsatisfactory setting of 'The Everlasting Mercy', Mase* field's first long story in verse (1911). But we are concerned with something more than the mere picking out and holding up of poetical jewels. Unable on the one hand to ignore the presence of the 'paste' contained in Masefield's narrative poetry or the unsatisfactoriness of certain stories as such, unable on the other hand to deny the repeated manifestation of great poetical qualities in these same stories, we want to account for this apparent paradox. Surely there must be some mental attitude, some conscious or subconscious theory behind it all.
One special kind of 'diagnosis' that would be as inade* quate and misleading as it is simple and obvious, is to be deprecated from the start. It is the use of the word 'roman* ticism' as if it were all*explanatory. No doubt, it was ro* manticism that sent Masefield to sea, as a 'reefer'. No doubt, it was temporarily baulked romanticism44) that made him a deserter from his ship and a potboy in a New York saloon. And of course it was again romanticism that induced him, in his few moments of leisure there, to seek refuge from the sordidness of his surroundings in reading and re*reading Malory. But it does not follow that we should be right in assuming that Masefield, being a romantic, would naturaUy rest content with the results of his first inspirations and shirk the coolheaded labours of the file. We may admit that 'classicism' stands for finish and careful, painstaking work, while insisting that there is nothing incompatible between romanticism and 'doing one's best'. Forgetting this would be unfair to many a romantic who, like Flaubert, has worn himself out in the passionate pursuit of perfection. To us it
**) Cf. his volume of prose stories: 'A Mainsail Haul.'



seems that the solution of the problem must be sought in Masefield's possession of a restless and teeming imagination, combined with inability to summon up a pomologisf s cun* ning self*denial in lopping off two promising sprays so that a third may bear all the more perfect fruit. A dreamer of a multitude of dreams, he wants them all realized, realized on paper, in cold print. And if the result does not entirely come up to his desire, there are so many voices calling him to some previously unattempted task that he finds it easier to set to work upon something new than to tinker at what has been accomplished. We may be sure that he is con* scious of the imperfections of his work. Some of his poems bear traces of revision. But the great anodyne of his artistic conscience is the way in which he makes a cult of imper* fection and failure. In this respect he outdoes Browning. 'The meaning shows in the defeated thing', is the moral with which he winds up one of his most characteristic poems, 'The Wanderer'. Most of his 'heroes' are unsuccessful. When they set out to find buried treasure ('Lost Endeavour'), the cache is found to be rifled. When they discover a remedy against sleeping^sickness ('Multitude and Solitude'), they are forestalled by other investigators. When they — or their horses — gain a race, the bookmaker absconds with the money that was to have settled their debts. ('Right Royal'). 'Reynard the Fox' is an exception. So is, seemingly, Saul Kane, the disreputable 'hero' of 'The Everlasting Mercy', which was Masefield's first and, for a long time, only, attempt at dramatic narrative, its central figure being a converted ne'er«do*weel.45)
Were we to say that the poem is in Browning's vein, the statement would require qualification, for it is beyond a doubt that Masefield would, very likely, have hit upon the form even if Browning had never existed. As a matter of fact, the poem gives us that peculiar kind of subjective utterance with which certain religious sects in England are even more familiar than with their Bibles, and which is one of the established institutions of the Salvation Army; it gives us that dubious sort of autobiography which is three parts self*abasement or even self*vilification to one part hallelujah*chanting, chiefly at the end. We listen to a 'brand
*») 'Enslaved' followed ten years afterwards.



snatched from the burning' as, on a platform of Masefield's providing, he holds forth and testifies how, after a long period of wallowing in the world's mire, he repented and was 'saved'. The genre is a Standard one among the hosts of English*speaking revivalists, and in appropriating it our poet owed little to Browning.
Also, the spirit of his work is poles apart from Brown* mg s. HisSaulKane revels in self*revilement, whereas Brown* ing's characters — paying homage to the ideal in their own fashion — always treat us to attempts at selkjustification. As to the question which of the two poets is the better psychologist in this respect, there cannot be two opinions.") There is something morbid and distasteful about prolonged backward looks at a disreputable past, and besides, it is fraught with danger to the soul. Lot's wife, safely escaped from Sodom, could not help looking back, and was duly punished. Surely, revivalists, salvationists, et hoe genus omne might do worse than lay that lesson to heart. They should reflect that it is safer for the mental health of a regenerate sinner that the shameful aspects of a sordid past should be over and done with, and they should refrain from fostenng in their converts that fatal habit of dweiling on sms committed long ago, in their unregenerate days, which in mne cases out of ten causes them to relapse in the long run, while about the tenth case there will be an unpleasant suggestion of sanctimoniousness. We cannot help suspecting Masefield's 'Saul turned Paul* of insincerity when we behold hun gloating over the sins we supposed him to have abjured Ihose glowing descriptions of orgies bespeak a mind for which the smful past still has a great fascination, whilst the moral and rehgious reflections interspersed with them affect us as if the narrator pulled himself up occasionally, realizing with a start that this is a queer kind of 'uplift' or ediffcation to treat an audience to, and hurrying to take the sting out ot his indiscretions. But he cannot help committing new ones, and it is remarkable how his hankering back after the f eshpots of Egypt is betrayed by his diction, which is the slangy and humorous diction of a confirmed sinner, not the unvarnished language of a real castigator of vice.
MoJriSTST W,haMC P?Ülted °Ut 0n page 69 fa 'onnèction with Morris s treatment of the character of Regin.
15



Besides, it is at the mercy of Masefield's need for rimes:
'And this is Sodom and Gomorrah, And now 1*11 burn you up, begorra.'
savs Saul, a West Countryman, in a poem otherwise free fïom Irishisms. As for the poet's grammar, is takesthe unlfceliest leaps from «Standard' to what passes for dialect And this hotchpotch of styles intensifies the ^ssion o insincerity that we constantly receive, constantly that is to when Saul Kane is speaking in his own person not when he is quoting. Mrs. Jaggard's indignant speech after Tnatching her boy away from the poacher's. company, though a trifle long, rings true from begmmng to end.
'Look on him, there', she says, 'look on him And smell the stinking gin upon him, The lowest sot, the drunk'nest liar, The dirtiest dog in all the shire: Nice friends for any woman's son
After ten years, and all she's done 
Tve washed eight little children's limbs, I've taught eight little souls their hymns, I've risen sick and lain down pinched And borne it all and never flinched; But to see him, the town's disgrace, > With God's commandments broke in s face, Who never worked, not he, nor earned. Nor will do till the seas are burned, Who never did since he was whole A hand's turn for a human souL But poached and stole and gone with women. And swüled down gin enough to swim m; To see him only lift one finger To make my little Jimmy linger.... I might have spared myself the pain, And done the world a blessed riddance If I'd a drowned 'em all like kittens 
This is different stuff from Saul's own gin and piety:
The 'Lion' had a window burning. So in we went and up the stairs,
Treading as still as cats and hares 
At head of stairs upon the landing
A woman with a lamp was standing 
'T was Doxy Jane, a bouncing girl With eyes all sparks and hair all curl, And cheeks all red and lips aU coal, And thirst for men instead of souL She's trod her pathway to the fire. Old Rivers had his nephew by her.



I step aside from Tom and Jimmy To find if she 'd a kiss to gimme. I blew out lamp 'fore she could speak. She said, 'If you ain't got a cheek 
0 SauL Here's missus. Let me go.' It wasn't missus, so I didn't, Whether I mid do or I midn't,
Until she 'd promised we should meet Next evening, six, at top of street 
1 feit the dart strike through my liver. God punish me for 't and forgive her.
Each one could be a Jesus mild,
Each one has been a little child,
A little child with laughing look,
A lovely white un written book;
A book that God will take, my friend,
As each goes out at journey's end.
The Lord who gave us Earth and Heaven
Takes that as thanks for all He's given.
The book He lent is given back
All blotted red and smutted black.
'Open the door', said Jim, 'and calL'
Jane gasped, They '11 see me. Loose me, Saul
She pushed me by, and ducked downstair
With half the pins out of her hair.
I went inside the lit room rollin',
Her scented handkerchief I 'd stolen.
'What would you fancy, Saul?' they said. 'A gin punch hot and then to bed.' 'Jane, fetch the punch bowl to the gemmen; And mind you don't put too much lemon 
Jane brought the bowl of stewing gin And poured the egg and lemon in, And whisked it up and served it out While bawdy questions went about Jack chucked her chin, and Jim accost her With bits out of the 'Maid of Gloster.' And fifteen arms went round her waist (And then men ask, Are Barmaids chaste?)
O young men, pray to be kept whole From bringing down a weaker soul. Your minute's joy so meet in doin'
May be the woman's door to ruin 
Till men despise the game they started, Till health and beauty are departed, And in a slum the reeking hag Mumbles a crust with toothy jag, Or gets the river's help to end The life too wrecked for man to mend.



We spat and smoked and took our swipe
Till Silas up and tap his pipe,
And begged us all to pay attention
Because he 'd several things to mention....
I took the purse and hemmed and bowed.
And called for gin punch for the crowd,
And when the second bowl was done,
I called, 'Let's have another one.'
Si's wife come in and sipped and sipped
(As women will) till she was pipped.
And Si hit Dicky Twot a clouter
Because he put his arm about her;
But after Si got overtasked
She sat and kissed whoever asked 
We remarked before that, seemingly, Saul Kane is, like 'Reynard', an exception to the rule that Masefield s heroes are unsuccessful, since he is not only victorious m a boxmg* bout but wreaks his will (and something over) upon his fellowmllagers, besides giving 'old purple parson a piece of his mind. But by Mrs Jaggard he is worsted; parson, too, gives as good as he gets; and against Miss Bourne, the dignified Quakeress, he has no chance whatever. Last of all, he! who has never done a stroke of honest work in all his life is fain to offer his services to a ploughing farmer, tle has come to grief - in his capacity of vainglorious sinner. But there is jov in his heart and in heaven, althougn we may presume that whenever Saul Kane recalls his Previous exploits, the devil rubs his hands, feeling that his hold on his former votary is not gone yet, and that it may strengthen as time proceeds. ,
It is physical disgust as much as repentance for gitts nus* spent' that causes Saul's conversion. It is 'beauty as well as lightness of soul that rewards him. At a tale of conversion Masefield never tried his hand again. But the idea of beauty continued to haunt him, 'beauty 'comprising m his mind all that heals the heart, reconcÜes the soul to its existence, and fires the imagination.") This is to say that hisi conceptaon of 'beauty' is vague and confused, though Dauber, a strik* inö narrative poem and, in our opinion, his best, would lead us to think him an Aristotelian, an adherent of the cele* brated imitation*theory. Its hero, at any rate, for whose treatment at the hands of the ship's 'reefers Masefield must
«*) Compare CecÜ Biggane's John Masefield, a Study, p. 33.



have drawn on his own reminiscences of practical jokes played or suffered in his youth, is an avowed imitator, and it does not seem fanciful to regard him as the poet's mouth* piece when setting forth his views of life and art.
The 'dauber' is a farmer's son, who, disobeying his father's wishes, has shipped before the mast on board a clipper, in order that he may study the sea in all its moods and aspects and put the beauty of it all on canvas after* wards.
Si**) talked with Dauber, standing by the side *Why did you come to sea, painter?' he said. 'I want to be a painter,' he replied, And know the sea and ships from A to Z, And paint great ships at sea before I'm dead; Ships under skysails running down the trade — Ships and the sea; there's nothing finer made.
'But there's so much to learn, with saib and ropes, And how the saib look, full or being furled. And how the lights change in the troughs and slopes And the sea's colours up and down the world. And how a storm looks when the sprays are hurled High as the yard (they say) I want to see; There's none ashore can teach such things to me.
'And then the men and rigging, and the way, Ships move, running or beating, and the poise At the roll's end, the checking in the sway — I want to paint them perfect, short of the noise; And then the life, the half decks full of boys, The fo'c'sles with the men there, dripping wet I know the subjects that I want to get
'It 's not been done, the sea, not yet been done,
From the inside, by one who really knows,
I 'd give up all if I could be the one,
But art comes dear the way the money goes.
So I have come to sea, and I suppose
Three years wijl teach me all I want to learn
And make enough to keep me till I earn.'
Even as he spoke his busy pencil moved, Drawing the leap of water off the side Where the great clipper trampled ironehooved, Making the blue htlls of the sea divide, Shearing a glittering scatter in her stride, And leaping on full tilt with all sails drawing, Proud as a war<horse, sniffing battle, pawing.
**) One of the 'reefers.'



T cannot get it yet — not yet,' he said;
'That leap and light, and sudden change to green.
And all the glittering from the sunset's red,
And the milky colours where the bursts have been.
And then the clipper striding like a queen
Over it all, all beauty to the crown.
I see it all, I cannot put it down.
'It 's hard not to be able. There, look there!
I cannot get the movement nor the light;
Sometimes it almost makes a man despair
To try and try and never get it right
Oh, if I could, — oh, if I only might
I wouldn't mind what hells I'd have to pass,
Not if the whole world called me fooi and ass.'
The last line is weak, an undoubted anticlimax, which many poets would have eaten their pens rather than have written down, and we are driven to ask why Masefield, the votary of beauty, does not expunge such lines after having inadvertently committed them. We fail to understand why a homo faber should overlook the fact that it is possible for the gifted individual to create beauty by taking pains. It is only by taking pains that we can get near to perfection. Man's works, being man's, are always the better for some revising, some 'touching up', and to say this is not to con* found perfection or beauty with ornateness. On the contrary it is a commonplace observation that •flourishes' are used as quick and convenient expedients to hide defects, whereas diligent labour will spare no pains and spend hours and hours •merely' to get evenness of surface and a neat fitting together of parts. Why should Masefield find it impossible to practise what — by means of Dauber's words and a rela* tion of Dauber's deeds — he preaches? Beauty, in the realm of art, is not yielded by a thing rendered, but by a Ihing achieved, and we need not go to another poet than Mase* field himself for suitable 'evidence'. His own 'Cargoes is so universally known as to make quotation superfluous; and if anyone should maintain that the stanza about the
'Dirty British coaster with a salt»caked smoke stack.'
is a whit less beautiful than the one about the
'Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, ( Dipping through the Tropics by the palnvgreen shores,
he would simply condemn the poem as such. In art it is possible to get what is, humanly speaking, perfection out



of reactions to what is manifestly imperfect. Everybody knows that a girl in her teens is 'better looking' than an old woman, but everyone knows, too, that the same old woman as painted by a Rembrandt will hold her own against any Renascence beauty put on canvas by no matter what great master.
The word 'canvas' makes one think again of ships, and awakens the reflection that Masefield has always quarrelled with Keats's ingenuous enumeration of 'things of beauty' in the welldcnown opening lines of 'Endymion'. Sun, moon, trees, daffodils and the rest, they are all very well, no doubt, and Masefield has done honour to them on more than one occasion, but what of the sea, and what of the clipper, the loveliest representative of the genus Sailing»ship? It might be objected that Keats does not mention horse or stag, nor seamew either. It might be pointed out that a clipper, being a cargo*conveyer, was primarily an object of use, and beautiful as being a perfect adaptation of means to ends; likewise, that it was the culmination of a development that had taxed the mental and moral resources of countless gene* rations of shipbuilders. And the obvious moral to be drawn from these facts would be that, as the beauty of a clipper is perfect form, so is the beauty of a story; since a story, too, — even a story in verse — is, as we think we proved in our fourth chapter, primarily an object of use. And just as a superficial observer fails to realize this, and takes the clipper for granted, thinking it has 'just growed', so will a superficial reader fail to recognize all the hard and devoted thinking that has gone to the making of a perfect story. He will look upon the clipper as a kind of seadlower; he will consider the story a mere flower of the poetical mind. And there certainly is something in a story to warrant such an assumption. For the stories that satisfy mind and heart most completely are apparently natural developments of certain simple themes, which the imaginative logic of an author seized on and worked up.
Such a story is, apart from some signs of hurry in its versification, Trevelyan's 'The Foolishness of Solomon'. Such a story is, save for some few technical lapses, Mase* field's 'Dauber'. It makes the impression of having 'just growed', which is to say that its construction may be pro* nounced faultless. And besides being full of colour and



swing, it is manly stuff, the absence of any 'lovednterest' banishing the mawkishness which few of Masefield's works are entirely without and which makes 'The Daffodil Fields', its immediate successor, so unpalatable, both in places and as a whole. Even the too lavish use of the hard*worked word 'beauty' cannot spoil the total effect; Dauber's failure and death are free from sentimentality, a remarkable thing to achieve; and the closing stanzas should be among the un* forgettable things in English poetry:
Fair came the falling wind; a seaman said
The Dauber was a Jonah; once again
The clipper held her course, showing red lead,
Shattering the seatops into golden rain.
The waves bowed down before her like blown grain;
Onwards she thundered, on; her voyage was short,
Before the tier's bells rang her into port
Cheerly they rang her in, those beating bells, The new*come beauty stately from the sea, Whitening the blue heave of the drowsy swells, Treading the bubbles down. With three times three They cheered her moving beauty in, and she Came to her berth so noble, so superb; Swayed like a queen, and answered to the curb.
Then in the sunset's flush they went aloft
And unbent saÜs in that most lovely hour
When the light gentles and the wind is soft.
And beauty in the heart breaks like a flower.
Working aloft they saw the mountain tower,
Snow to the peak; they heard the launchmen shout;
And bright along the bay the lights came out
And then the night feil dark, and all night long
The pointed mountain pointed to the stars,
Frozen, alert austere; the eagle's song
Screamed from her desolate screes and splintered scars.
On her intense crags where the air is sparse
The stars looked down; their many golden eyes
Watched her and burned, burned out, and came to rise..
It is doubtful whether Masefield himself would concur with us in our appreciation of 'form' in the sense in which we used it above. 'Form' with its appeal to the intellect is either not his strong point, or he does not make it his aim, which, to be sure, is much the same thing. To him, 'beauty' is chiefly of the senses, and of the heart in terms of the senses, and he ignores the intellect, as if the reve*



lations transmitted by it were of an inferior kind. On the whole he appears, as an author, to be satisfied with a process of beautifying his stories by 'putting beauty in', so to say, by the insertion of dabs of colour and touches of light. Saul Kane, in his repentance, exclaims:
O Christ who holds the open gate,
O Christ who drives the furrow straight,
O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter
Of holy white birds flying after,
Lo, all my heart's field red and tom 
These 'holy white birds' are seamews out for grubs. They are white, and beautiful to see, but unholy, because fierce, and they have sometimes been called avian rats. And now the reader is expected to chloroform his intellect, to look upon these rapacious gulls as holy because of their pious colour, and to interpret their screams as laughter. It is in such passages that we see the Masefieldian poetical attitude at its worst. But it is not doubtful how the poet would respond to what he would consider our sophistications. He would assert that he feit inspired to write in the way that we censured, — and who are we, he would ask, that we should find fault with a poet's inspiration? In a lecture on 'Poetry' given at the Queen's Hall in London on October 15th, 1931 — shortly afterwards published by Heinemann — he expresses himself on this question in no uncertain ac* cents, even falling foul of 'small poets' (writing 'lesser poetry') who 'deny that the Muses exist and that inspiration is Other than excitement'49) (op. cit. p. 7); a reply to which may be found in our fourth chapter. Masefield's view of inspiration looks very much like Stuart Mill's soliloquy theory lifting up its head again, perhaps a little 'scotched' but by no means killed, and those who remember pp. 17 and 18 of this enquiry will understand that we think such an attitude, although it is not our own, consistent. It does not follow, however, that the reader is bound to accept this kind of inspiration and approve of all its works.
Since Masefield's poetical method is essentially one of
*') This must be a dig at A. E. Housman, who in his prefatory note to 'Last Poems' stated that he could 'no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excitement' under which in the early months of 1895 he wrote the greater part of 'A Shropshire Lad'.



beautifying bis narrative matter with spoils from land and sky and sea, — 'beautiful' things his responses to which cannot have been very different from Hudson's — we need not wonder at his appropriations from or imitations of other authors.60) There are e.g. the closing stanzas of 'The Daffodil Fields', containing much that is striking and original, but still in the vein of Matthew Arnold, reminis* cent of the magnificent close of 'Sohrab and Rustum'; and there is especially the First Part of 'Reynard the Fox' with its character*drawing in the manner of Chaucer. Such 'transference' of poetical flowers from one field to another was a common practice in the time of the Renascence, and it seems difficult to deny to Masefield a right which nobody has ever refused to Spenser or Milton. Besides, he may lawfully claim that his theory of poetry is much the same as theirs, and that his practice — allowing for certain pe* culiarities — resembles theirs likewise. His long narrative poems represent a return. But it is a return with a difference.
Spenser and Milton addressed aristocracies, the one an aristocracy of rank, the other an aristocracy of the Puritan spirit. Both these audiences were conscious of being a class apart, both of them weré well*educated, as education went in their days. Spenser's audience consisted of gentlemen, noblemen, courtiers, whose minds had largely fed on the classics; Milton's of Puritans who had thriven on theology and the Bible. Either category might be expected to under* stand their poet's allusive diction, and being familiar with Latin constructions and inversions or with the language of Canaan — often with both — did not baulk at archaisms and unusual constructions, Latinisms, Hebraisms, and the like. What circle of readers was envisaged and consciously addressed by such a man as Keats, it would be far more difficult to say. It must have been composed of a relatively small circle of kindred spirits, admirers, like him, of the English classics, men of letters, chiefly, to whom Spenser was more than a mere name, and Milton more than a great reputation. But the old cultured classes, to whom Pope still was a great poet, and who had for years and years ridiculed
oo) in bis first volume, 'Salt Water BaUads' (1902) most critica have detected a strong flavour of Kïpling; but that 'On Malvern Hill (Col* lected Poems', p. 39) was written in direct imitation of Housman (A Shropshire Lad', XXXI) we have never seen remarked upon.



Wordsworth, were in no particular hurry to take up a 'Cockney youth', who made it his principle to be as unlike Pope as possible, who revived archaisms, and who com* mitted divers grammatical liberties, converting nouns into verbs to his heart's content, even causing turtle*doves to 'passion their voices cooingly'. English society had become chaotic. The race of patrons of literature had become extinct, and the fame of an author rose and feil together with the fluctuations of the sale of his books. In the sim* plicity of Wordsworth — as afterwards in the comparative simplicity of Tennyson — there was much that appealed to the classes that were then in their upward struggle. Keats's manner repelled then as Doughty's manner — Doughty being an archaizer è outrance — does now.
Morris, too, used archaisms, but his syntax is simple, and his narrative method straightforward. He loves the epic splendour of the past, but he cares for his readers, too, and wants to be understood. Masefield does nöt archaize. The exigencies of rime and metre tempt him occasionally into committing vulgarisms, seldom if ever into perpetrating verbal contortions. His rhythm is the rhythm of the spoken word, and he triumphs over the very greatest difficulty that a narrator in verse has to encounter, — triumphs over it so completely as if it did not exist, — by writing dialogue which is really dialogue, and which, at the same time, is good vérse fitting in with the story. For an illustration we turn again to 'Dauber': 51)
'Please, sir, they spoiled my drawings.' 'Who did?' They.'
*Who's they?' 'I don't quite know, sir'. 'Don't quite know, sir?'
Then why are you aft to talk about it, hey?
Whom d' you complain of?' 'No one'. 'No one?' 'No, sir'.
'Well, then, go forward till you've found them. Go, sir.
If you complain of someone, then 111 see.
Now get to heil! and don't come bothering me '
The Captain and the Mate conversed together. 'Drawings, you teil me, Mister? 'Yes, sir; views Wiped off with turps, I gather that's his biether. He's Dick, who came to sea in dancing shoes, And found the dance a bear dance. They were hidden, Under the long=boat's chocks, which I've forbidden '
61) Section II: The hero has just come complaining to the mate. The retention of the m in whom (fourth line) is lip*service to the goddess 'Grammar'.



'Painter', the Captain called; the Dauber came. 'What's all this talk of drawings? What's the matter?' They spoiled my drawings, sir'. 'Well, who's to blame? The *long»boat's there for no one to get at her; You broke the mies, and if you choose to scatter Gear up and down where it's no right to be, And suffer as result, don't come to me.
'Your place is in the round»house, and your gear
Belongs where you belong. Who spoiled your things?
Find out who spoiled your things and fetch him here.'
'But, sir, they cut the canvas into strings.'
'I want no argument nor questionings.
Go back where you belong and say no more,
And please remember that you 're not on shore '
The Dauber reached the berth and entered in. Much mockery followed after as he went, And each face seemed to greet him with the grin Of hounds hot following on a creature spent 'Aren't you a fooi?' each mocking visage meant. 'Who did it, Dauber? What did Captain say? It is a crime, and thére '11 be heil to pay.'
He bowed bis head, the house was full of smoke; The Sails was pointing shackles on his chest 'Lord, Dauber, be a man and take a joke' — He puffed his pipe — 'and let the matter rest Spit brown, my son, and get a hairy breast; Get shoulders on you at the crojick braces; And let this painting business go to blazes *
That's right' said Chips; 'it's downright good advice. Painting's no good; what good can painting do Up on a lower topsail stiff with ice, With all your little fish»hooks f rozen blue? '
The Dauber did not answer; time was passing.
He pulled his easel out, his paints, his stool.
The wind was dropping and the sea was glassing —
He sat to paint alone and melancholy.
'No turning fools,' the Chips said, 'from their folly.'
We remarked before that Masefield, whose general con* ception of 'beauty' is as generous as it is involved, has made one of his characters — and the only one he has drawn who is, in aspiration if not yet in fact, an artist — an Aristo* telian, holding the imitation*theory, and it is pretty safe



to assume that 'Dauber' voices Masefield's own views.") We must now deal with an Aristotelian of some* what different stamp, a. conscious Aristotelian, who does not shrink from providing a charming narrative poem with two quotations from Professor Bywater's translation of Aristotle, and does not shrink either from ensconcing it behind a substantial preface.
'Catherine, a Romantic Poem by R. C. K. Ensor', was brought out in 1921, but before discussing the poem itself we must attend to its preface, which Ensor does not want to be skipped, and for which he offers no apology. Accord* ing to him the unwritten rule whereby new poems are debarred from more than formal prefaces, and which seems to have begun with Tennyson, 'has nothing to commend it. The habit of the bigger men from Spenser down to Shelley was otherwise; and to their prefaces we owe, as a matter of fact, nearly all the more helpful things that have been said in English about their art.'
So Ensor, feeling himself in good company, proceeds to give his views of what a narrative poem should be. It is true, 'good poems are not made by theories; but (save for the brief est cries of the heart) they cannot be made without them. To forget that it is a poet's duty to theorize is a common silUness.' He complains that narrative poetry in twentieth*century England — with the brilliant exception of Masefield's best work — is 'rarely written, badly written, misunderstood and undervalued,' — and here Ensor does not seem fair to Trevelyan and 'The Foolishness of Solo* mon,' which is most likely undervalued, but certainly is not badly written.
Ensor traces the neglect of narrative verse to two causes, one being 'the tyranny of the lyric'; the other, the fact 'that narrative poetry itself has got bogged in impossible ruts.
") Masefield ridicules the Mate, who, according to the unanimous verdict of the crew, draws ships far better than the Dauber will ever be able to do. The latter is an impressionist The Mate draws from a well* stored memory. His mcticulous methods must have been akin to those of le douanier Rousseau, ex*trumpeter of Bazaine's expeditionary forces in Mexico, who afterwards painted naïve pictures of tropical forests, and who 'was coming into his own' by the time when 'Dauber' was con* ceived and written.



'The source of the first is at least as much commercial as spiritual. No poet can count on being noticed nowadays unless he is incessantly publishing. This means (for authórs who comply) short poems, and it makes for the vogue of the lyric; as it also has made for those of vers libre (Ensor's italics), of stridency, bizarrerie, and pruriency — in short, of all the labour*shirking devices.
'But (and here we pass to our second point) the lyric vogue has injured even where it has not displaced. It has not only stopped narrative poems from being written, but helped to cause them to be written badly. Critics confuse lyric with the whole of poetry,58) and fancy that a verse narrative can only be a poem if it is a series of lyrical passages strung on the story like beads on a string. But this is not narrative poetry at all. The true narrative poet, from Homer downwards, draws his effects out of the story
itself In practice the or namental method proves un*
readable. It is all very well for the short space of a lyric to be filled up with one or more purple patches. But a long poem written like that merely taxes the attention without presenting anything to sustain it; since no story in which the author is not primarily interested can hold the interest of the reader.
'There hes one of the ruts, in which narrative poetry, as I have said, has bogged itself. But it is not the only one. At least as fatal is the doctrine which orders the poet to be a genre*painter and insists on his reproducing the externals of any age and culture in which his story may be set. This doctrine forgets that his main business is not with externals at all (prose copes with them far more fittingly), and that the real reason why poets have usually cast their narratives in other ages and countries than their own is not that the past is more poetical than the present, or the distant than the nearsby, but simply that a story set in the reader's own surroundings has perforce to treat externals more elabo* rately, and that such elaboration, however skilfully done, is irrelevant, and even obstructive to the main business of poetry.'
After a hearty condemnation of archaic English as a narrative vehicle, and after insisting that the narrative poet
53) Cf. our note on John Drinkwater (p. 11).



can do no better than use the best language that is really current, — a pronouncement which we cannot help en* dorsing, having committed ourselves to the view that literary art is the outcome of the need for communication (v. Chapter IV of this enquiry) — Ensor considers what 'structure' has most to commend itself, since he deprecates 'the present practice of writing narrative poems on any scale to which the author's pen may chance to carry him,
and subdividing them (if at all) with no less caprice '
The length to be aimed at for each subdivision 'should be that for which the reader can be expected to continue his attention without break; and no more. The past practice of poets may help to indicate this; but only so far as it has been untrammelled by blind tradition, or by obsolete material factors (such as the length of papyrus rolls). The cantos of the 'Divina Commedia' average about 150 lines. The 'Iliad', according to the theory which Mr. A. E. A. W.
Smyth seems to me to have about as nearly proved
as is possible in such a case,54) consisted originally of
45 cantos each exactly 300 lines long Remembering that
the movement of Homer's verse is very rapid and that of Dante's very slow, I suggest that we may not be very far out, if we fix our norm in the neighbourhood of 250 lines, and keep our variations above or below it within about
33 percent either way. [This] has a working corre*
spondence with the major divisions of the maturer Greek plays.'
Having established his canto, Ensor investigates 'whether there are any norms to guide us in the number of cantos.' He finds something elementally right in the structure of a drama with its one, three or five acts, and argues that a similar division would be equally desirable for narrative poems, winding up as foliows:
'There is a type of critic common in England before whom it is only necessary to lay an argument like the foregoing, in order to convince them that one's work must be wholly uninspired. They assume that any artistic form is 'mechanical' if it is pre*conceived. They regard it as a positive disqualification for poetry that the intellect should
M) 'The Composition of the Iliad'. By A. E. A. W. Smyth, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. (Ensor's note).



have had any share in producing it. They feel quite certain that inspiration cannot be run into moulds.
'How such people square their view with a phenomenon like the poetic drama I do not know. But it is obvious that every writer of poetry for the stage has the scale of his whole piece and its main divisions pretty rigidly prescribed for him, and must mould his plot and treatment to fit the framework. The better he does it the more he succeeds. Experience has not shown that the discipline quenches the sacred fire; and if a dramatist can run his inspiration into the mould of one, three, or five acts, why cannot a narrative poet do likewise? To*day, the distrust of form and neglect of any but verbal technique are damagingly overdone among us. How much wiser was Goethe's reminder: 'Blasen ist nicht floten — ihr müsst die Finger bewegen!' Overdone, too, is the notion of poetry as something wholly quintes* sential, wholly abstracted from the concrete, a spirit with no body to it. There is indeed a quintessence that we seek; but we shall err if we seek it in abstraction. Old poets have spoken of poetry as a banquet; the newer school seems rather to conceive it as a liqueur. One need not lack sym* pathy and admiration for their work (much of it far finer than the public as yet perceives), if one nevertheless feels its scope to be too narrow. Our age merits a more alhround poetry; it must re*discover the larger aims and simpler manner of the narrative and drama; only so can it liberate its soul.68)
Follows the story, told — as was to be expected — in five short cantos, only the fourth running to more than three hundred lines; told, as is but natural, in a manner reminis* cent of Chaucer:
In far Bohemia, beyond the sea,
A king in former time had sovereignty,
Called Wenceslas; of whom the children sing.
He was in life a very royal king,
And at his court there was a company
Of knights and paladins, that had great fame;
For thither all the most victorious came,
And John, his son, was ranked the valiantest
Of kings' sons upon earth; and for the rest
He always reigned in majesty and power.
M) The italics are ours everywhere, except where otherwise stated.



One daughter had he in his hall, the flower Of virgins, and the glory of that place; You could not paint her beauty and her grace Though you might rhyme about it all the day; For she was as a cowslip is in May, Spring's most delightful handiwork was she. Also for candour, truth, and courtesy She was so loyal and so lovable, There was no soldier there who would not well Have died for her; the servants all, nay more, The very hounds that lay along the floor, Feit happy in the sunshine of her smile; The noble hall seemed but a casket vile Made to contain this one surpassing gem....
The motif is that of Regulus, sent by the enemy 'on parole' to his countrymen to reason them into submission, and it lends itself exceedingly well to the kind of growth* like development that we noticed in discussing Masefield's 'Dauber'. The poem has a directness and a rapidity of move* ment that would have pleased Matthew Arnold, and though it lacks neither similes nor 'atmosphere', adorn* ment for ito own sake is rigorously barred. The reader's suspense increases till he has reached the end of the fourth canto, where the hero gives himself up to the Turks, as he had undertaken to do in case their proposals were not ac* cepted; then it subsides gradually as he reads on, in Canto V:
The Sultan was a jovial big man, And as he sat upon his high divan At his head quarters in the royal tent His beady eyes twinkled with merriment.
And even after 'the busy Grand Vizier' has told the Sultan that about the prisoner
The holy Mullahs are of one accord.... They deprecated bloodshed; but they said, The one good Christian is a Christian dead,
the reader knows that Sir Marinel's life will be saved. It is a good story; it is such a one as we can well imagine some modern Chaucer might teil to his family*circle to prevent them from meddling with gramophone or receiving*set. It contains one 'hour after painful hour' hne M) which we will forgive, closes with a good moral, which everyone should appreciate, and soon invites a second reading. But as regards
**) Cf. our observations (or strictures) on Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse', p. 193.
16



poetical merit it must yield the palm to Columbus which Ensor calls a 'historical' poem ('every fact of which he would also give in a prose biography'), but which under his hands has become like a saga. It is, of course, constructed on the same lines as 'Catherine'; but — thanks, most hkely to its weightier subjectanatter — its verse, while remaining direct and swift, has rather gained in fulness and sonority. lts five anonymous cantos embody in their sequence: the concep? tion of the idea (I), the struggle for its realization (11, 111 and IV) through the three stages of disappomtment, unex* pected succour, and the ordeal of the enterprise itself; and the reward bestowed on a seemingly successful man (V). Risking the poet's displeasure we will quote a few passages which are not purple patches, but fair samples of a well* woven, even texture: The püot.8 ^
Was of a paradise for man and beast, With fruit and game and honey overflowing, Edible roots and lofty timber growing, Sweet water, fertile soil, benignant air. Moreover he had found men living there; These must descend from Adam, like us all; And therefore even if the isles were small, They must be outposts of a continent Linked to our own. And since no sailor went Ere now across the Atlantic barrier, Their fathers must have travelled eastward there By land through Asia, and our west must be
Their east, and this the only uncrossed sea.
Cross it, you belt the globe! make mankind one!
The thought dazzled Columbus like a sun.
Small help or countenance had he from those To whom he dared in confidence disclose
His newly born idea; one and all
They judged it fevered and chimerical,
A freak, a tropical mirage; in sum
A piece of total topsy»turvydom.
Grant the world round; was not our hemisphere
Plainly the upper? Did it not appear
We walked above it, treading on its floor?
How in the under half could men explore
While clinging to an earth above their heads,
Like flies on ceilings hung, or bats in sheds?....
(Canto 1, 11. U£—iiy).
As we read this brisk current of verse, the staccatos of 'The Dawn in Britain' seem far behind us. And se- are the slow*moving Tennysonian brooks, and Swinburne s verbal eddies.



SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK.
Our summary may be short.
The irony of Fate has willed that what we may term the decomposition of narrative verse in England (together with what has been called the tyranny of the lyric) was heralded, in the heyday of nineteenth century individualism, by a philosopher and economist pursuing an ignis fatuus, the philosopher being encouraged by a prophet, who, for all his thunders against the spirit of the time, was, like his friend, too deeply immersed in individualism to see his way through the question.
The same irony has willed likewise that, less than a hundred years afterwards, in a period that, as likely as not, is pushing its repudiation of individualism to undesirable extremes, the reaction in favour of the story in verse is both heralded and exemplified by an ex*sailor, who, with* out a theory, but with a heart full of music and a head full of 'yarns', pours his narrative stuff out in verse that, what* ever may be its faults, is intensely alive; — and by a 'learn* ed' poet theorizing and practising his art in conformity with his theories.
Between the two 'landmarks' indicated, some genuine narrative poems continued to be written in the teeth of disparagement — disparagement voiced most arrogantly by Swinburne — their authors being chiefly men with strong social feelings, who had mixed with the world of action. Meanwhile an idyllic method, while ostensibly leaving the 'story' intact, filled it with a lyric content; and a lyrico* dramatic kind of narrative poetry arose, which would appear to have reached the limit of its development in the 'Dramatic Reveries' of Wilfrid Gibson. It is at any rate difficult to see what it can lead to.
But for the narrative poem on genuinely narrative lines there still seems to be a future, as it is far better calculated than the lyric is to hold an unsophisticated audience.
16»



BIBLIOGRAPHY. *)
Lascelles Abercrombie, The Epic. — London, no date. Apuleius, vide Bétolaud and Helm.
Matthew Arnold, 'Essays Literary and Critical', Everyman's Library, no
date. — The Poems of M. A. (1849—1867). — Oxford, 1921. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, third impr. — Boston, 1924. P. J. de Béranger, Chansons 1815—1834. — Paris, 1858. Victor Bétolaud, Oeuvres complètes d'Apulée. — Pari, no date. Robert Bridges, Poetical Works. — Oxford, 1913.
Stopford A. Brooke, Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life.
In two vols. — London, 1905. Robert Browning, The Poetical Works. In two Volumes. — London, 1902. Robert Buchanan, The Outcast: A Rhyme for the Time. — London, 1891. Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus; fiinfte, verbesserte Auf lage. —
Leipzig, 1919. Osbert Burdett, The Brownings. — London, 1929.
Lord Byron, The Complete Works, Edited by John Galt — Paria, 1837. The Cambridge History of English Literature; Ed. by Sir A. W. Ward
and A. R. Waller. Vols XII and XIII: The Nineteenth Century I
and IL — Cambridge 1921—1922. Thomas Carlyle, Letters to John Stuart MUL John Sterling and Robert
Browning. EA by Dr. Alexander Carlyle. Sec. Ed. — London, 1924Chamissos gesammelte Werke; herausgegeben von Max Koch. — Stuttgart
& Berlin, no date. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. — London, no date. Arthur Hugh Clough, The Poems and Prose Remains. Edited by his wife.
Vol. I. — London, 1369. A. Cluttondïrock, William Morris. — London, 1914. W. J. Dawson, The Makers of Modern English: A Popular Handbook
to the Greater Poets of the Century. Fifth Edition. — London, 1895. Wilhelm Dilthey. Gesammelte Schriften, VI Band. Die Geistige Welt.
Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens. — Leipzig & Berlin, 1924. Charles M. Doughty, Travel* in Arabia Deserta. Two Volumes. —
London, 1924. — The Dawn in Britain. Six vols. — London, 1906. John Drinkwater, The Lyric. — London, no date. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticlsm. —
London, 1920.
R. C. K. Ensor, Catherine: a Romantic Poem. With a Preface on Narrative Poetry. — London, 1921. — Columbus; a Historical Poem. — London, 1925.
Barker Fairley, Charles M. Doughty: a Critical study. — London, 1927. Firdausi, The Shahnama. Done into English by A. G. Warner, M. A. and
Edmond Warner, B. A. — Vol. II. — London, 1906. J. A. Froude, Essays in Literature and History. London (Everyman's
Library), no date. Arnold van Gennep, La Formation des Légendes. — Paris, 1920. Wilfrid Gibson, Akra the Slave. — London, 1910. — Fires (Three 'Books'). —London, 1912. — Livelihood: Dramatic Reveries. — London, 1917.
*) Exclusively of books quoted from



J. M. Guyau, L'art au point de vue sociologique. («APS). Treizième Edition. — Paris, 1923. — Les problèmes de 1'esthétique contemporaine.
— Dixième Edition. — Paris, 1921.
John Hargrave, Harbottle: A Modern Pilgrim's Progress from This World
to That Which Is to Come. — London, 1924. R. Helm, Apuleius I Metamorphosen L. XI. — Lipsiae, MCM VIL*) A Heusler. Vide Johannes Hoops.
Johannes Hoops, Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde. Dritter
& Vierter Band. — Strassbourg, 1911—1919. Q. Horatii Flacci Carmina iterum recognovit Lucianus Mueller. — Lipsiae,
MDCCCXCII.
R. H. Horne, Orion; with an Intro du ction by Eric Partridge. (Text of the first edition with the variant readings of the ninth or definitive edition noted.) — London, 1928.
A. E. Housman, Last Poems. — London, 1922.
W. H. Hudson, Hampshire Days. — London, 1923. — Birds and Man.
— 1924. — Adventures among Birds. — 1924. — Afoot in England. — 1924. — A Traveller in Little Things. — 1924. — Nature in Downland.
— 1925. — A Hind in Richmond Park. — 1929.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, Herausgegeben von der Köninglich Preussisches Akademie der Wissenschaften. Zweiter Band. —Berlin, 1904.
Wilhelm Jordan, Nibelunge. Zweites Lied: Hildebrants Heimkehr. —
Frankfurt a/Main. 1892. John Keats, The Poetical Works. Edited etc. by H. Buxton Forman,
C. B. — London, 1931. W. P. Ker, Form and Style in Poetry: Lectures and Notes. Ed. by R. W.
Chambers. — London, 1928. Charles Kingsley, Poems. — London 1889. Hugh Kingsmill, Matthew Arnold. Second Ed. — London, 1931. E. A. Greening Lamborne, The Rudiments of Criticism. — Oxford, 1921. Carl Lange, Sinnesgenüsse und Kunstgenuss. — Wiesbaden, 1903. Sidney Lanier, The Poems. Ed. by his Wife. — London, 1906. Le Morte Darthur by Syr Thomas Malory: The Original Edition of
William Caxton now reprinted and edited with an Introduction and
glossary. By H. Oskar Sommer Ph. D. Vol. I. Text John Masefield, The Collected Poems. — London, 1923. — Poetry, a
Lecture. — London, 1931. John Stuart Mill, Early Essays, Selected from the Original Sources by
J. W. M. Gibbs (*M.) — London, 1897. — On Liberty. (Intr. by W. L.
Courtney.) — London, 1901. — Dissertations and Discussions. —
London, 1910. — The Autobiographie. — London, 1924. William Morris. (Eirikr Magnüsson and —), Volsunga Saga: The Story
of the Volsungs and Niblungs. With certain songs from the Elder
Edda. — Ed. by H. Halliday Sparling. — London, 1888. — The Story
of Sigurd the Volsung, and the Fall of the Niblungs. Eighth Impression
— London, 1904.
*) Our quotations are from Bétolaud, which is a more 'popular' work than Helm's edition, because the version given by Bridges agrees far more closely with the former's reading than with those accepted by the learned and painstaking German.



Harold Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry. — London, 1925.
Mrs. Oliphant and F. R. Oliphant, B. A, The Victorian Age of English
Literature. Two volumes. — London, 1892. Thomas Love Peacock, The Novels. One Volume Edition. — London, 1903. Marmaduke Pickthall, Oriental Encounters. — London, 1929. Alexander Pope, The Poetical Works. Ed. by A. W. Ward M. A. —
London, 1869. ^ • „ _
J. B. Priestley, George Meredith. — London, 1926. The Monthly Re» 'pository for 1933. — London. The London Review for 1935. — London. Th. Ribot, La psychologie des sentiments. — Paris, 1911. H. V. Routh, God, Man, & Epic Poetry: A Study in Comparative
Literature. Two Vols. — Cambridge, Engl., 1927. George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe
from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day. 3 vols .— London,
1900—1904. ' , .
George Santayana, The Life of Reason. In Five Volumes. — London,
no date. , .
Levin Ludwig Schücking, Die Soziologie der literanschen Geschmacks»
bildung. Zweite erweiterte Auflage. — Leipzig & Berlin, 1931. Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History
of Taste. — London, 1924. Paul Souriau, La beauté rationnelle. (»So I), - Paris, 1904. — La rêverie
esthétique: Essay sur la psychologie du poète («So II). — Paris, 1906. Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative. Stereotyped
Edition, Vol. II (*Sp. II). — London, 1883. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Victorian Poets, Revised, and Extended, by
a Supplementary Chapter, to the Fiftieth Year of the Period under
Review. — London, 1887. Stendhal, De 1'amour: seule édition compléte. — Paris, 1928. A C. Swinburne, Collected Poetical Works. Two vols. — London, 1924. Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poetical Works. One Volume Edition. —
London, 1901. , „ _ , Cfc .
Edward Thomas, Algernon Charles Swinburne: a Critical ötuay. —
London, 1912. _ .
James Thomson, Vane's Story, Weddah and Om-el-Bonam, and Other
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INDEX OF AUTHORS.
A.
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 78, 79. 'Antiquus', v. Mill, John Staart Apollodorus, 54. Apuleius, 42, 44, 128. Aristotle, 237.
Arnold, Matthew, 9, 81, note, 93— 101, 116, 117, 125, 127, 129, note, 138, 175, 234, 241.
Austen, Jane, 102, 104, 109.
B.
Babbitt, Irving, 16.
Béranger, 204, 205.
Biggane, Cecil, 228, note.
Bion, 125.
Blanc, Louis, 112.
Boccaccio, 44.
Bramah, Ernest, 10.
Bridges, Robert, 21, note, 128,
139—143. Brooke, Stopford, 166. Brown, T. E., 214. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 104—
115, 127.
Browning, Robert, 97, 106, 179,
197—214, 218. 220, 224, 225. Buchanan, Robert, 206, 215. Bücher, Karl, 46. Bulwer«Lytton, 168. Bunyan, 60, 170. Burdett, Osbert, 104, 106, 211. Burns, 197, 203. Byron, 17, 50, 56, 90, 108. Bywater, Ingram, 237.
C.
Caesar, 84. Camoens, 163. Campbell, Thomas, 102. Campbell, Roy, 193. Carlyle, Thomas, 51, 53, 81, 103, 198.
Carlyle, Dr. Alexander, 199. Cervantes, 44.
Chamisso, Adelbert von, 205. Chateaubriand, 56, 103. Chaucer, 163, 234, 240, 241. Chesterfield, 39.
Chesterton, 10.
Clough, 116, 117, 120—129, 206. Clutton-Brock, Arthur, 79, 80. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 19, 164, 206.
Considérant, 112. Cowper, William, 34, 205.
D.
Dante, 21, 239. Dawson, W. J., 164. Dilthey, Wilhelm, 25, note, 45. Dio Cassius, 84. Disraeli, Benjamin, 59. Doughty, C. M., 82—92, 235. Drinkwater, John, 11, note, 238, note.
DrostcHülshoff, Annette v., 20. Dryden, 156.
Dumas, Alexandre, pére, 179. E.
Eliot T. S., 99, 193.
Emerson, 116, 120.
Ensor, R. C. K., 17, note, 237—242.
F.
Fairley, Barker, 83, 88, 92, 93.
Firdausi, 82, 96, 97.
Flaubert, 223.
Fouillée, Alfied, 104.
Fourier, 112.
Frankau, Gilbert, 10.
Frazer, Sir James G., 97, 148, note.
Freeman, Augustus, 81.
Froude, James Anthony, 81.
G.
Gautier, Théophile, 21, nofc. Gay, John, 112. Gennep, Arnold van, 42, 97. Geoffrey of Monmouth, 84. Gibson, Wilfrid, 215—221, 243. Gifford, William, 206. Gobineau, 81.
Goethe, 20, 21, 52, 102, 116, 120,
121, 163, 205, 240. Goldsmith, Oliver, 102. Góngora, Don Luis de, 39.



Gordon, Adam Lindsay, 214. Gutteling, Dr. Johanna, 99. Guyau, 48, 104, 126.
H.
Hargrave, John, 17. Hartmann von Aue, 148, nofe. Heine, Heinrich, 212. Herder, 41.
Herodotus, 42, 43, note. Heusler, A., 63.
Homer, 21, 23, 44, 79, 95, 96, 98, 100, 121, 122, 178, 238, 239.
Hoops, Johannes, 63.
Horace, 17, 23, 90.
Horne, Richard Henry, 53—61,62, 67, 163.
Housman, A. E., 233, note, 234, note.
Hudson, W. H., 25—39, 43—47, 82,
124, 125, 234. Hugo, Victor, 98, 185, 219. Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 102, 110,
116.
J.
Jeffrey, 206.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 218. Jonson, Ben, 90. Jordan, Wilhelm, 66.
K.
Keats, 16, 50, 61, 83, 128. 130, 167, ' 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 196,
197, 231, 234, 235. Ker, W. P., 110.
Kingsley, Charles, 81, 116, 128, 129. Kipling, 234, note. Knowles, 168.
KingsmilL Hugh, 97, 124, 125. L.
Lamborne, Greening, 9. Lang, Andrew, 78. Lange, Carl, 29, note. Lanier, Sidney, 88. Leconte de Lisle, 98. Lindsay, N. Vachel, 165. Longfeüow, 120, 121. Lockhart, John, 17, 206. 'Longinus', 17. Lucian, 42.
M.
Malcolm, Sir John, 97.
Malory, Sir Thomas, 77, 144, 148,
149, 151—154, 180, 223. Masefield, John, 10, 222—237,241. Massinger, Philip, 99. Meredith, 10.
Mill, John Stuart, 10—21, 41—43, 49—53, 94, 102, 103, 106, 167,168, 180, 193, 198, 202, 206, 233.
Miller, Joaquin, 214.
Müton, 95, 96, 163, 169, 234.
Moore, Thomas, 21, note.
Morris, William, 62—81, 83, 92, 110, 131, 149, 163, 180, 181, 195, 225, note, 235.
Müller, F. Max., 89.
Multatuli, 212.
N.
Nicolson, Harold, 177. Nietzsche, 125. 'North', 'Christopher*, 17. Noyes, Alfred, 93.
O.
Oliphant, Mrs., 62. Ovid, 41.
P.
Paschebs, Wolf, 155. Peacock, Th. L., 60. Pepys, Samuel, 20, 21. Pickthall, Marmaduke, 137, nofs. Plato, 165. Polybius, 84.
Pope, 192, note, 234, 235. Priestley, J. B., 10, note. Proudhon, 112.
R.
Reul, Paul de, 144. Ribot, Th., 45, nofe. Richardson, Samuel, 102. Rossetti, D. G., 149, 214. Rousseau, 41. Routh, 100.



s.
Saintsbury, 42. 43, note, 78, 79, 96. Sandburg, Carl, 47. Santayana, George, 19. Schücking, Levin L., 20, 105, note. Scott, Geoffrey, 49. Scott, Sir Walter, 102, 179. Scudder, Vida, 144. Shaftesbury, 14.
Shakespeare, 90, 95, 96, 105, 154,
191, 206. Shaw, G. Bernard, 133, 211. Shelley, 14, 19, 32, note, 50, 197,
237.
Smyth (A. E. A. W.), 239.
Souriau, P., 17, 26, 34, note, 101.
Southey, R., 102.
Sparling, J. Halliday, 63.
Spencer, Herbert, 48.
Spenser, Edmund, 60, 87, 90, 92,
234, 237. Stedman, E. C, 163. Stendhal, 128, 130, 137. Swift, 44.
Swinburne, 143—155, 179—196,241, note, 242, 243.
T.
Tacitus, 84. Taine, 104.
Tennyson, 17—19, 81, 90, 91, 97,
115, 143, 149, 152. 163—179, 194
—196, 203, 235, 237. Theocritus, 125, 171, 174, 177. Thomas, Edward, 190, 191, 192. Thompson, Hamilton, 78, 80. Thomson, James, 128, 130—139,
141, 142, 164, 212—214. Trevelyan, R. G, 155—162, 231,
237.
V.
VirgiL 172.
W.
Walther von der Vogelweide, 39. Watson, Sir William, 105, note, 192.
Wells, H. G., 10. Whitman, 88.
Wordsworth, 14, 20, 76, 77, 163, 202, 203, 216, 235.







CONTENTS.
Chapter Page
t John Stuart Mül's Theory of Poetry 9
II. Objections to Mill's Theory 16
III. Beauty and the Cultured Layman 25
IV. Mutual Relations of Story*telling and Poetry 41
V. Diediards: First Group. Attempters of Epics 50
VI. Diediards: Second Group. Novelists in Verse 102 VIL Diediards: Third Group. Romancers 128
VIII. Tennyson, and the Encroachments of Lyricism 163 IX. Browning, and the Reconciliation of Narrative
and Lyricism 197
X. Masefield, and the Return to Pure Poetical
Narrative 222
Summary and Outlook 243
Bibliography 244
Index of Authors 247















i