A STUDY OF ENGLISH POETRY.* OUR author does not know
whether to look upon the increasing appetite for newspaper-reading as an entire evil or not. He only knows that it has to be faced and accepted as a reality, to which he considers that the study of poetry may be accept- able, and accepted as an antidote by those who wish to frame for themselves an "equable, serene, in a word wise, economy of life," with the assistance of the friendly counsel and converse of these makers of literature,—the voinTai. The tendency of modern life is to make everybody angry, especially the philosopher. The note of Huxley and Ruskin alike seems to be nearly always anger ; and how difficult the study of poetry has become may be quite sufficiently gathered from the sad tone prevailing in it, of which there is as much, if not more, than ever. Freshness and health and breeziness seem gone, and we can hardly imagine what kind of reception a new " Lady of the Lake " or " Corsair" would meet with now, or to whom, except the professional reciter, the lay of a Macaulay or an Aytoun would be welcome. Mr. Dixon goes so far as to wonder if Twelfth Night or Midsummer Night's Dream would not seem as hopelessly trivial, if now produced, as the latter, at all events, did to Pepys in his day. There we think Mr. Dixon needlessly pessimist. The Foresters was not voted trivial, though it was too undramatic to attract, as all Tenny- son's plays except Becket have practically proved. And the extraordinary force and beauty of Shakespearian verse has an effect which never can be minimised away. Nobody can listen to the language of Viola, spoken, as it may even now be heard, in the wonderful and rhythmical music of Miss Rehan's voice, faultless throughout in harmony and modu- lation, and yet come away and question it.
Mr. Dixon opens his first chapter with a quotation from Pope, writing in 1716 of "poetry and criticism as by no means the universal concern of the world, but only the affair of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there." That it is mere lotos-eating in idleness will be the prevailing view of it to all time, championed by such different giants as Plato and Carlyle. Plato passed judgment on the poets, and excluded them from his commonwealth ; but allowed their defenders, who must not, however, be writers of poetry themselves, to speak in prose on Poetry's behalf, and prove, if they could, that she might really be useful to a State as well as pleasant. That Carlyle thought the best praise a poet could receive was to be told that he ought to write good prose, we all know, and no doubt the sage himself was among the prose-poets. But the worst of definitions is that they are always push- ing us a step farther back. A definition of poetry is impos- sible, frankly admits Mr. Dixon. And who is to define "being useful "P Mr. Dixon does not seem quite sure in his own mind of the nature of his own auguries. " Poetry, we may safely say," he writes, " will never attract the crowd, or draw to the seclusion of its shrine a multitude of devotees such as worship with passionate abandonment the great goddess, Success, and so can never become, in any complete • English Poetry, from Blake to Browning. By William Diaencile Dixon, Trinity College, Dublin. London: Methuen and Co. 1894. sense, a universal concern ; but we may indulge the hope that by means of a wise criticism the confines of the poetic realm may be indefinitely extended, and the benign influences of its sovereignty experienced by an ever-growing number of sub- jects." Never surely was outlook more poetically vague than this. There is certainly such a thing as success in poetry, and it has even within living memory been known to assume financial shape ; and why should the devotees of the great goddess, rightly named, deny her her usual tribute for assum- ing that especial form ? There are lovers of poetry, on the contrary, who fondly hold that she should never be associated with monetary worth at all ; and we have heard of an admirer, many years ago, who went home quite depressed and dis- heartened after seeing some flocks of prosperous sheep marked " A. T." in red letters, which denoted the proprietorship of the Laureate. It is not so with most, and if the question, " What is it ? is it a true thing? " the old Shakespearian text quoted by our essayist, be superseded amongst us by the more modern question, " What is it ? does it pay ? " we at least know of no reason why poetry should not be honoured amongst the moderns even when it does. It is not a common weed; but it is a curious fact of these newspaper days that verse-writing in papers and magazines remunerates the writers well, when republications in a volume fall dead upon the market. Of his own trade, at all events, Mr. Dixon has no misgiving, when he looks to wise criticism as poetry's road to indefinite extension, oddly forgetting that in the very passage from Pope, which he quoted just before, as to that same "universal concern," the satirist had coupled the two as the affair of idle men. We do not ourselves much believe that criticism will ever greatly enlarge the circle of poetry-readers. An especial attack or eulogy may injure or push a poem, as it may have the reverse effect. But it is the readers of poetry who read true poetical criticism, forming, as it does to them, part of the same delightful diet ; and it is they who will be interested in Mr. Dixon's volume, though we doubt if he will enlarge the circle of her worshippers to any appreciable extent. We fail to follow him when he adds that with the vast majority "a faith in poetry struggles to be extricated, but is not extricated." We do not believe that the great majority have any hankering whatever after a poetical faith ; though we fear that, among the cultivated who talk about poetry, there are a great number whose knowledge is derived, rather from what they have read about poetry, than what they have read of it. It is one of the things about which " one must know something," or at least one thinks so.
Mr. Dixon, we must confess, does not seem to add very materially to our stock of knowledge or thought upon the old, old question. We do not detect any very new theory of the connection of poetry with the various epochs of history, or find any new light thrown upon our many old favourites among the singers, our obstinate old prejudices and pre- dilections remaining very much where they were. Indeed, we are not sure if the principal province of criticism, if not its purpose, is not just to strengthen both. Even where we are temporarily shaken in a heresy or an allegiance, it is only to come back to it with a rebound. And we do not find in Mr. Dixon a sufficiently secure guide to our wandering imaginations. He has told us by quotation, and on his own account, that one of the dangers of poetry is its "leisureliness," if we may coin a word to suit us ; and in the main, we can believe that to be true. But when he comes to the " Parting of the ways," as he calls it in his own version of the recognised peculiarities of the earlier part of the present century, he tells us that poetry was the natural voice of the " Sturm and Drang " of its dawn, " but with the succeeding calm, with the quieter, steadier pulse of the body politic and social, came the era of prose, representative of mental equanimity ; of the novel, affording artificial stimulus to compensate for the loss of exciting causes in the real world ; of wsthetic and scien- tific inquiry, only possible to a people who have leisure in short, an era dominated by the critical rather than the productive spirit." Now, if we had set up for ourselves a theory in accordance with the earlier portions of Mr. Dixon's book, it would be but to find it dethroned here altogether. The rush of the present age was the whole text of the discourse ; and it certainly appears to us as clear as the sun that it is as a consequence of a rush like that that poetry goes to the wall. The intense eagerness for scientific discovery and scientific progress, the problems of Democracy and of population, the thirst for gold and the cult of success, are surely as much the opposites of leisure as anything can well be. Nor do we see that the novel, however different in its nature from poetry, is therefore less the out- come of the productive spirit. It is the same spirit in another form, that is all ; and we are ourselves inclined to believe that the one-man fact, rather than anything else, lay at the bottom of that innovation, as it does of so many over and over again, as to make us hold firmly that "the one man" moves the world from time to time, as Napoleon did, for instance, and as many others have done. Whatever the source of that problem, there it is. When Walter Scott found that the audiences were tiring of his work in verse,—his Ladies of the Lake and his Bridals of Triermain (even more delightful to ourselves,—delightful as few works are) he took to writing them in prose, that is all—not the least to represent his increased mental equanimity, but rather because that equanimity was a good deal decreased by the diminution of profits. The ambition to found a house moved the one man, and the one man moved the world. Moreover, in another form there was a recurrence of the old problem. When Byron's fiery stories became " the fashion," Scott's breezier ones ceased to be so. One nail pushed out the other. And we cannot help thinking that the links which connect one age with another in these literary matters are always wondrously the same. One man and one style cease to be the fashion ; and another becomes so, moulded of course by the growth of language and by the spirit of the age in other matters, with which it must always be in accord. It does not appear to us the least reasonable to suppose that the present craze for Ibsenism, and what we may call " literary agnosticism," will continue beyond its day ; but, on the contrary, we think that there is likely to be a considerable return to the old belief in the domestic simplicities, heralded by the ease with which almost the feeblest forms of laughter are, as we pointed out recently, welcomed as a wholesome relief. And it is curious, as a contemporary and effective comment upon Mr. Dixon's idea that Twelfth Night would now be voted frivolous, to watch the crowded audiences who hang upon Miss Rehan's Viola—a perfor- mance as harmonious, as poetical, and as supremely tender as any man need ever wish or hope to see ; one with surroundings worthy of it—and take obvious and happy pleasure equally in the exquisite language and in the homely humour with which that pearl of fanciful comedies alternately abounds. There is room for all tastes, we believe, in this overcrowded universe.
We have left ourselves but little space to dwell upon Mr. Dixon's treatment of his various poets. And, honestly, he nas nothing very new to say about them. We are a little tired of the perpetual writing about Wordsworth's obvious contradictions, of his close communion with Nature, of the meditation, tranquillity, and beauty of much of his poetry, and of the undoubted fact that there was a great deal too much of it, and that much excision would have improved him wonderfully. To the people who hold with Mr. Bagehot, from whom Mr. Dixon gives us a very amusing quotation, that poetry must be " memorable and emphatic, intense and soon over "—which should be a " definition " practical and expressive enough to please anybody—Wordsworth might seem little likely to be an idol, though it did so happen that he was one of Mr. Bagehot's idols, and that he at least found Words- worth, in his meditative moods, " most memorable, em- phatic, and intense," even if not " soon over." And to the mystics, Shelley will always be their chief apostle of the beautiful, let Mr. Dixon and those who take his view, deny him as they may. Of course he is often involved and unintelligible ; but for sweet music, and for more than that, we thought his supremacy a thing practically admitted. Indeed, the melodious quality seems to Mr. Dixon a fault, as he says that Shelley often "transgresses into the sphere of music, which is the sphere of unbroken symbol." To the present writer it is the most extraordinary marriage, when at its best, which music and poetry ever achieved. We doubt if such absolute music in words, clear enough in meaning for anybody, exists anywhere as in the famous " Lines to an Indian Air," and we have never forgotten hearing them sung—or rather chanted—to the very air—which really was Indian—to which they were written. When Mr. Swinburne assigned him the first lyric place, as undoubtedly as the dramatic was Shakespeare's, we do not, with Mr. Dixon, "need time to recover breath," having very often suspected and held the same ; and we learn but little from being told that his " palpitating and feverish emotions " have nothing in common with " calm pleasures and majestic pains," and that they do not "help humanity" like Sophocles and Shakespeare. We all know that Shelley was wild, and emotional, and eccentric; but if he may not teach us calmly, he can teach us in his own way. We must do Mr. Dixon the justice to say that he grows ashamed of him- self towards the end of his chapter, and confesses himself borne to the verge of recantation of all be has said when he begins to quote some lines from the " Ode to the West Wind."
Indeed, when he limits himself to pleading for more " sanity in criticism" from the wilder of the Shelleyan enthusiasts he may not find himself so much in a minority.
We have mused over Mr. Dixon's writing rather than fol- lowed it out in any very logical spirit, feeling that dealing with a professed critic on such matters the less we try to be the custodian of the custodian the better. We had rather
indicate. We must say, however, that we are glad to find that the author, who hails from Trinity College, Dublin, has the historian's courage to stand up for much abused Moore, and claim for him a better place than is often assigned to that sweet song-writer. Tennyson and Browning are the subject of the interesting remarks which close an interesting volume, with the inevitable speculation on Tennyson's indefinite but earnest creed ; and the innate temperance of mind which held him back on dangerous questions. Not an uninteresting close to the book is a little chronological index of the principal events in literature, not poetry only, for a hundred years, from 1770 onwards. It is a carious beginning this :- " 1770. Chatterton died ; Wordsworth born ; 'Letters of Junius ;' Burke, Thoughts on the Present Discontent ;' (Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen ;' Burger's Lenore:)-17 71. Gray died ; Scott born.-1772. Coleridge born (Lessing's Emilia Galeotti.')— 1773. Ferguson's Poems ; Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer.'- 1774. Southey born ; (Goethe's Werther ;') Goldsmith died.- 1775. Savage Landor born ; Lamb born."
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