ARISTOCRATIC AND DEMOCRATIC POETRY.

ARATHER remarkable poem, not without fire and not without imagination, which was sent to the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday by some warm friend of aristocratic politics and fierce -opponent of the rule of the multitude, suggests very forcibly an interesting question as to the grounds of the affinities of poets for the opposite schools of politics,—the aristocratic and democratic, the refined and the popular. That many poets have belonged to political schools which had nothing whatever to do with their poetical bias is, of course, certain. No one would think of tracing any particular connection between the politics and poetry of Oliver Goldsmith, the denouncer of capital, the admirer of peasant proprietors,—or the politics and poetry of Dr. Johnson. The former's school of politics, and the latter's school of poetry were in all probability circumstantial accidents, not secrets of their individual nature,—accidents which might have been reversed had other companions and associations been theirs. But we can- not say the same of all poets,—or, perhaps, even of many great ones. It is impossible to conceive of any great change in the politics of Milton or Shelley without supposing that their poetry itself should have undergone some great change. We do not think it would be easy to conceive the greatest -of all epic poets, Homer, without that aristocratic and, to be guilty of a gross anachronism in form though not in spirit, almost feudal spirit, which has made his poetry the dearer to the English aristocracy, and given it, no doubt, a fresh charm in the mind of such a one as Lord Derby. The wide gulf of the centuries scarcely separates the tone in which the Hone E. G. -Stanley used to inflict, or at least intend to inflict, rhetorical -chastisement on O'Connell, from the vivacity with which Homer narrates what Lord Derby translates—Ulysses' rebuke to Thersites, and the account of the personal scourging with which it was -accompanied :— "Thou babbling fool, Thersites, prompt of speech,

Restrain thy tongue, nor thus revile the Kings Ill it beseems that such a one as thou Should lift thy voice against the Kings, and rail With scurril ribaldry and prate of home," &o.

'Homer and Lord Derby alike felt that scorn of demagogues -which is expressed in these contemptuous lines, and in the description of Thersites' cowardly tears and ignominious suppres- *ion ; but there is no trace that Homer ever felt the other phase of the problem, ever shared for a moment that deep love of the people and keen scorn for aristocratic selfishness which appears so powerfully in much of our best modern poetry, and as far as we know in no ancient poetry except the poetry of the Hebrews. We are disposed to believe that the side on which our deepest .modern poetry, from Milton downwards, allies itself to one or the -other school in politics is almost always, wherever the alliance is at all vital, religious. In Shakespeare, no doubt, it was not so. Mr. Bagehot in his brilliant criticism on Shakespeare has shown -that, in a political sense, the great poet had a truly Homeric con- tempt for " the mob," a truly aristocratic disbelief in shopkeepers, and a truly British feeling of loyalty to the ancient polity of this .country, "not because it was good, but because it existed ;"—in a word, that as regards politics, he represented the school of consti- tutional freedom with a strong preference for the personal pre- -dominance of a refined nobility. But Shakespeare, though in a large and true sense religious, gives less expression to the inten- sity of personal religious feeling than to any other of the greater affections, passions, and emotions which have had an immense influence over man. He expressed religious feeling in poetry only in the sense in which Scott and Goethe expressed religious feeling, and, like Scott and Goethe, leaned to aristocracy because he loved the refinement, the "perfection of demeanour," to use Mr. Disraeli's phrase, the self-reliance, the calm, the leisurely judg- ment, the sobriety and ease of resolve, which an aristocracy usually show in greater perfection than either a middle-class government or a democracy. Goethe's and Scott's aristocratic politics were due to the same feeling. Goethe was always com- plaining of the misfortune that in the State "no one was willing to live and enjoy, every one wanted to be ruling." These three great poets cast what we may call a calm secular eye on the universe, observed certain advantages which belonged to certain

classes for the work of government, and spoke out against what they regarded as the anarchy caused by the interference of the multitude with this natural order. But in fact, politics enter very slightly, and almost entirely incidentally, into the poetry of any of these great men. Their tastes and practical sympathies made them aristocratic, but their poetical faith was in no way essentially political. But there are other poets, great and small, of whom it is impossible to say the same thing. Where Heine, Victor Hugo, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Clough, Buchanan are political, their politics are so closely interwoven with their poetry that you cannot separate the one from the other without violence. Of these we should call Tennyson a constitutional, with a strong bias towards aristocracy, but less from any dominance of taste, than from moral and metaphysical conservatism. Wordsworth passed from the one school,—the school which represents the democratic " enthusiasm of humanity,"—into the other, and his poetry was closely identified with both, and can be seen to change with his change. The others are almost entirely in the opposite school, though in Mr. Clough's case there was a vein of half-humorous belief that an aristocracy of rank, though not in itself a reason- able institution, was an "economy" or " dispensation " in some respects useful to the special failings of the British citizen.

But how are the two schools of politics related to the very essence of poetry? Mr. Bagehot, —the author of the remarkable papers in the Fortnightly Review on the application of the Dar- winian theory of conflict of species to political societies,—would say, we imagine, that the ancient poets were all aristocratic in tendency, because then the great necessity which impressed itself most on all men with an imagination, was to get a yoke of law sufficiently powerful to bind men together in some per- manent society, and suppress the centrifugal passions of bar- baric energy. On the other hand, he would say, probably, that in modern times, and especially in the West of Europe, the want which impresses itself most powerfully on men of imaginative genius, is the want of originality, variety, individual courage to protest against this yoke, and assert the freedom of the individual soul,—and that hence the higher poetry tends more and more,— we do not say to democracy, which may too much impose this dead uniformity and monotony,—but to the demolition of authority, to rebellion against conventional ideas, to wide devia- tions from the customary types of political conception. But we are afraid this theory—which we apologize to Mr. Bagehot for attributing to him, as it is a mere inference from his striking papers,—would fail in the most critical of all instances. The poetry of the Bible, during the prophetic period at least, is one long protest on behalf of the people against the hard legalities, both ecclesiastical and political, which kings and priests and the richer classes had imposed upon the Hebrew nation. Here was a people by no means subdued to the yoke of law,—perhaps the most indomitable people on which a legal yoke was ever pressed,—and yet all their poetry lives and breathes in the faith that kings and rulers exist only for the people ; that the poor are even more God's care than the rich ; that God " filleth the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent empty away ;" that " He hath cast down the mighty from their seats, and hath exalted the humble and the meek." What- ever this doctrine that the people must be prepared for a reign of law before they are prepared for the reign of liberty may be worth in other respects, the poetry of the Hebrews does not, like the poetry of Greece and Rome, afford the slightest testimony to it.

We take it that the two sides on which politics approach the poetical faculty are these. The aristocratic constitutional poets, the anti-democratic poets,—the poets who feel with the poet of Monday's Pall Mall and with Tennyson,—cannot endure the idea that the deepest life of humanity depends in any important degree on anything so external and circumstantial as political arrange- ments. Their notion is that popular enthusiasms and democratic visions exaggerate altogether the influence of any kind of political arrangement, and exaggerate them in the wrong direction. The writer of the poem in the Pall Mall apparently believes that Christ's religion is essentially opposed to democracy. He says, to the aristocrats after reproaching them for their last year's breach of trust in selling the suffrage to the " vain mechanic " :- "Leave to your lawful master's itching hands

Your unhinged lands, But keep, at least, the dignity Of deigning not, for his smooth use, to bo, Voteless, the voted delegates Of his strange interests, loves, and hates.

In sackcloth, or in private strife

With private ill, ye may please Heaven,

And soothe the coming pangs of sinking life ; And prayer perchance may win A term to God's indignant mood, And the orgies of the multitude Which now begin ; But do not think to wave the silken rag Of your unsanctioned flag, And so to guide The great ship helmless on the swelling tide Of that presumptuous sea, Unlit by sun or moon, but only bright With lights innumerable that give no light, Flames of corrnpted will and scorn of right, Rejoicing to be freo. And now, because the dark comes on apace When none can work for fear, And Liberty in every land lies slain, And the two Tyrannies unchallenged reign, And heavy prophecies, suspended long At supplication of the righteous few, And so discredited, to fulfilment throng, No longer clieck'd by faithful prayer or tear, And the dread baptism of blood seems near, That brings to the humbled earth the time of grace, Hushed be all song, And let Christ's own look through The darkness, suddenly increased,

To the grey secret lingering in the East."

Which are " the two tyrannies," by the way ? The tyrannies of the press and the mob, or the tyrannies of despots and mobs?

Tennyson's horror of democracy is soberer and less tinged with religious fear of " the orgies of the multitude," but it comes from the same root ; profound disbelief in the righteousness of " the herd," and a certain moderate amount of trust in the righteous- ness of the established order, and the statesmanship of the govern- ing class :—

"But pamper not a hasty time, Nor feed with crude imaginings

The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings That every sophister can lime.

"Deliver not the tasks of might To weakness, neither hide the ray From those, not blind, who wait the day, Tho' sitting girt with doubtful light.

"Make knowledge circle with the winds ; But let her herald, Reverence, fly Before her to whatever sky Bear seed of men and growth of minds."

Tennyson is, perhaps, slightly aristocratic by taste, but his convic- tion, so far as it is deeply conservative, rests on utter distrust of the power of any circumstantial change to renovate life, and a great dread of the "crude imaginings" of the multitude who, in their misery, are apt to believe far too much in the power of law to " cause and cure "moral maladies. Wordsworth, again, without any vestige of Tennyson's aristocratic taste, with a deep and almost religions preference for poverty, simplicity, and frugality of life, and a hatred of luxury not due to asceticism, but to fear of its power of distracting the mind from high spiritual thoughts, passed from the phase of revolutionary enthusiasm which marked the French Revolution—from angryassertion that "Earth is sick and Heaven is weary with the hollow words which States and Kingdoms utter when they talk of truth and justice,"—to that later Conservatism which was founded solely in the belief that all great changes for the better must be moral, and begin with individual wills; and that such are really within all men's grasp, if they would but desire them. To the last he was suspicious of wealth, and no admirer, rather a despiser, of rank. But the poetry of the world to him was solitude. He believed that "beneath the hills, amid the flowery groves, the generations were prepared;" —that there, if anywhere, "the pangs, the internal pangs were ready," by which men learn to give birth to new virtues and new life. He soon lost his first youthful sense of the coherence and grandeur of society and social unity. His poetry was always profoundly solitary, deeply individual in its root. He could scarcely enter into one that ran with the great social currents of popular life,—that was warm with the golf-stream of popular hopes. His tendencies, sometimes called pantheistic, were so in in no ordinary sense except perhaps on the side of physical nature alone. Even the only true element of pantheism, the Christian ele- ment, which treats humanity as one body with many members so closely organized that " whether one member suffer all the members suffer with it ; or one member be honoured all the members rejoice with it," finds little or no reflection in Wordsworth's poetry. The root of his poetry is the hardy mountaineer individualism, the self- relying dignity of meditative spirits without any deep sense of "solidarity,"—the "lonely rapture of lonely minds."

But there is much of the newer poetry which has in it an " enthusiasm of humanity " whose drift is quite opposed to Wordsworth's and Tennyson's distrust of collective life, of " the herd whom every sophiater can lime with wild imaginings."

Shelley is the greatest poet who has adopted it with passion, and he has exaggerated and perverted its principle into a mystical pantheism of almost Comtist tendencies,—almost a worship of the

Grand-Etre of humanity. Shelley disbelieved in men, believed only in man. He called, for the fair future he hoped in, on " Man, oh, not men ! a chain of linked thought,

Of love and might to be divided not Man one undivided soul of many a soul Whose nature is its own divine control," &c. ;

But untrue, and so far as untrue, needlessly narrow in poetical power, as Shelley's pantheism was, it struck a poetic key which has never ceased to vibrate, and is at the root of the popular passion of so much modern poetry. The modern passion of sympathy with those whom Carlyle contemptuously calls " the dim common populations,"—those against whose " orgies " the Conservative poet in the Pall Mall so scornfully appeals to " the grey secret lingering in the East,"—is, after all, but a return to the poetry of the Hebrews. No doubt multitudes are guilty of crimes like individuals, and when they are, their power is terrible. But peoples are far more open to high and generous, than to selfish and interested motives. If we could but sever the cold and sober critical judgment necessary to government, from the decision of really great questions, we should for the latter have infinitely higher faith in the vox populi, than in any statesman's mind, however great. The poetical faith in waves of popular feeling is altogether justified- The weakness of popular feeling as a political force lies not in its decision on great questions,butin its indifference on small questions, and the certainty that when once the popular feeling ceases to be deep and intense, the low, vulgar motives will be infinitely more active, and less under check in a popular government than in an aristocratic government. This was proved to be so in the great American Civil War, where on all great matters the people spoke out nobly, and on all smaller matters of administration and judgment, corruption reached dimensions never before known- The vox populi is often as near the vox Dei as we can get, but then there is no vox populi as to the dimensions of the Estimates, or even on the adjudication of the finer questions of social justice. Still, neither does true poetry deal with this class of subjects. And the poetry which cherishes a deep faith in the people, seems to us to be without doubt the true religious poetry, the poetry which best beieems the faith in Him who has always united men that He might purify, instead of purifying that he might unite, because He knows that while evil is a conspiracy which is separately engendered before it can combine, good is an enthusiasm which combines first and seeds itself afterwards in those whom it has overrun.