BOOKS.

SIR F. II. DOYLE ON POETRY.*

Ix these three lectures of his first year's Professorship, Sir Francis Doyle has added one more to the many thoughtful discussions of that still unanswered question of human philosophy, what is poetry ?'—also an essay of great delicacy and discrimination, the most effective, we think, of the three, on 'Provincial Poetry,'—and a criticism of Dr. Newman's "Dream of Gerontius," which does, perhaps, less complete justice to the singularly powerful poem under review, though it endeavours to do that, than it does to the medimval class of poems of which Sir Francis Doyle considers the "Dream of Gerontius " as a belated representative. The inaugural lecture seems to us the least striking of the three, although, or perhaps because, it is written on a theme which every thoughtful man tries at some period of his life to master in vain. On a subject on which so much has been written, we look insensibly for a higher standard of power than we do on subjects where the competition has been less close and the effect of 'natural selection' less operative. We shall scarcely be able to do more than criticize the general drift of this first lecture. Sir Francis Doyle is always sensible ; indeed, sometimes he seems to think so much more of the reputation of good, sound, worldly sense than of anything else, that he rather ostentatiously eschews the authoritative style of his predecessor in the chair, and displays in its place an almost strained and artificial humility if not levity, as though he would call attention to the fact that he is a mere man of the world, and not either authorized or willing to affect the voice and tone of academic wisdom; —as, for example, where he compares (p. 9) the poet who succeeds amongst the many who fail to Beau Brummers successful white muslin tie among the uushapelymass of crumpled neckcloths; speaking of itas 'a flower which had emerged out of some thirty dishevelled existences.' Ihat passage strikes us as showing a shade of the affectation which exults in affecting nothing, and as lowering slightly the dignity of his subject. But the man of the world's sense, which is slightly exaggerated in passages like this (and which is not after all Sir Francis Doyle's forte, as he shines in the analysis of delicate and tender beauty or sentiment), is displayed to better effect in passing sentence on the fanciful theories of others. Thus the forced simile which we have quoted occurs in a controversial passage intended to refute a view of Mr. Ruskin's, scarcely, perhaps, worth Sir Francis Doyle's powder and shot, that minor poets are of no use, have no raison d'être, and should suppress their swallow flights of song' altogether. Against this Sir Francis argues very justly, that in smothering your small poets you might very well smother an unfledged great poet amongst them ; that a great poet is only selected from amongst the small by a process akin to that by which, in Nature, the natural advantages of select individuals of the various animal or vegetable types contribute to their nourishment and aggrandizement,--and that thus it is by cor

dial appreciation of the good things of minor poets, that the popular sympathy is cherished on which the great poets feed. That is good sense and good criticism ; and Sir Francis Doyle shows precisely the same kind of good sense and good criticism where he maintains that the poetic imagination is not a specifically different faculty from any possessed by ordinary men, but a faculty common to all men specially developed, specially nourished, and in unusually high intensity.

So far we go heartily with the Oxford Professor. When he comes, however, to give his own account of what the poetic faculty is, we are far less satisfied. First, he traces back poetry in the main to "that dissatisfaction with what is present and close at hand which is one of Nature's silent promises to the heart, one stimulus to the advancement of our race, one evidence of the abiding greatness of man." This is Campbell's dogma revived, that 'distance lends enchantment to the view,' &c., and we doubt exceedingly if it be true at all. It is not distance ' but freshness of perception which is alone necessary for the poetic apprehension. It is habit, not nearness, which dulls the mind and the sense. As a great thinker has observed, if you look at a familiar landscape upside down, i.e., with your head between your legs, all the first glory of its fresh colouring and soft radiance will return to you, simply because the unusual posture gives back to the eye its power of seeing what it has forgotten to see as not affecting the practical details of the landscape. Even sharp pain, as well as keen joy, will frequently restore the power of framing any object of thought or perception in the true imaginative atmosphere, not because either the one or the other pushes what is perceived or thought away to an ideal distance, but because all keen life, painful or delightful, stirs up the vital power, and throws a new intensity into the act which had grown dull with the monotony of habit,-at least, so we should account for the facts we have named ; and the same account may, we believe, be given of what Sir Francis Doyle has, we imagine, present to his mind, when he speaks of poetic power as being rooted in dissatisfaction with " what is present and close at hand." The truth, no doubt, is that we remember the past, and look forward to the future, with only the more vivid parts of the past and the more vivid expectations of the future prominently before us ; the stale, flat, unprofitable' details of our old experience disappear, and as regards the future fail to appear, and we see vividly only that which is really vivid to us, only that in which we have been or are deeply interested. If dissatisfaction with the present were the true root of poetic feeling, almost every one might be a poet in looking backward or looking forward. Yet that is so far from the case, that nothing is less poetic in truth than empty idealism. There is no such thing as true poetry without the power to find it in the realities of the present, and to transfer the minute detail of immediate perception to the visions of the past or the future. How could Wordsworth's rapture over the daisy, or Tennyson's soliloquy of the Northern farmer, be classified under Sir Frances Doyle's general formula of "dissatisfaction with what is present and close at hand," or presented as a special form of Shelley's "desire of the moth for the star "? So far from that line of Shelley's describing the essence of all poetry, it seems to us to describe only a very rare kind of poetry indeed, which it takes a more unique faculty than almost any other kind to make poetry at all,—the poetry of abstract desire, the poetry of that vague thirst of the soul which is universal indeed, but almost universally unpoetic,—because it has no sufficient individuality of feature to stamp any clear image on our minds unless it be taken up as the theme of a mind whose desire burns keener, brighter, and more clear than that of the vast majority of our race. In the fine lecture on 'Provincial Poetry' Sir Francis Doyle remarks that poems with a 'pathetic wail 'in them are much easier to make effective than any other, because they are sure to command an echo from "instincts alive in all hearts at all times." The fact is true, but we doubt very much about the Professor's explanation. If it were the true explanation, the poems of love and hope, being equally sure to command an echo, would be equally likely to please ; and we know none that are more difficult to write, and more certain in ordinary hands to fail. The reason, we believe, why poems with a 'pathetic wail' in them are on the whole more popular, and more successful, is not that they appeal to "instincts which are alive in all hearts at all times," but that they are apt to appeal to these instincts with a special reality and individuality of form. Nothing is more noticeable than the habit which fresh grief has of clinging to individual traits and incidents in the past wherein was realized the fullness of that of which we now feel so keenly the want. Thus the beauty of Mr. Barnes's exquisite little Dorsetshire poem, on which Sir F. Doyle is commenting when he makes this remark

as to poems with a 'pathetic wail' in them, seems to us to be due to the intense reality with which the mourning father recalls the happy little walks to church, and more especially the passage of the little family procession through the white turnstile, in each of the four successive niches of which each of the four members of the family passed in turn to the other side, and to the vivid picture of the swelling hearts with which they now observe the last niche turn empty round the axis :—

" But up at woone pleace we come by

'Twere hard to keep woono's two eyes dry; On Stein-cliff road, 'Min the drong, Up where, as voYk do pass along, The turnen-stile, a-painted white, Doo sheen by day an' show by night.

Vor always there, as we did goo To church, thik stile did let us drough, Wi' spreaden °firms that wheol'd to guide Us each in turn to t'other aide.

An' vu'st ov all the train he took

My wife, wi' winsome gait an' look ; An' then zent on my little maid, As skippen onward, overjayd To reach agean the pleace o' pride, Her comely mother's left han' zide.

An' then, a-wheelen roun', he took On me, 'Rhin his third white nook.

An' in the fourth, a-sheaken wild, He zent us on our giddy child.

But yesterday ho guided slow

My downcast Jenny, vull o' woe,

An' then my little maid in black, A-walken softly on her track ; An, a'ter he'd a-turn'd agean, To let me goo along tho lean°, He had noo little bwoy to viii

His last white earms, an' they stood still."

The distinctive feature here is not in the appeal to "instincts which are alive in all hearts at all times," but in the peculiar success of that appeal through the perfect individualization of the situation ; and we take it that it is because grief is so much more apt to be minutely real in the detail of its individualizing memory than either the passion of love or the anticipations of hope, that poems of this class are so much oftener successful than poems of any other. It is not in the universality of the instinct which breathes in them that their frequent success consists, but in the disposition of that instinct to vivify truly the minute detail of real life, to cling to particulars with passion. Indeed, Sir F. Doyle partly admits in a later passage that it is of the essence of poetry to individualize,—i.e., we imagine, that its essence does not consist in "dissatisfaction with what is present and close at hand." For he says :—" From this point of view, the first constituent element of the imagination seems to be a particular form of memory, which presents its facts in groups, with all their attendant circumstances and details retraced to the life. It stretches out, as it were, into a spiritual gallery, holding and exhibiting a long series of pictures gathered from the past ; one man recollects that such a thing has happened, another exactly how it happened, and this last kind of recollection is, no doubt, one of the main foundations on which the imagination has to rest." We confess that we do not see the reconcilability of this statement with the false analysis of the root of poetic feeling to which we have referred.

Then the lecturer goes on to assert that "the radical difference which separates the poetic imagination proper from other forms of the same faculty, from those at least which deal with articulate words, is that it is essentially and above all things suggestive," which he explains further by saying that instead of elaborating a theme like a rhetorician, "a poet is content to touch a chord which then vibrates at will as its own sensitiveness may dictate ; and according to the number and intensity of the vibrations awakened, legitimately awakened, I mean, is the poetical power shown." He illustrates his meaning by a passage from Jeremy Taylor

" But, again, let us take this other sentence :--`I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who, living, often refused to be painted, but put off the importunity of his friends by giving way that, after a few days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death to the life.' The Bishop then proceeds to enumerate, rhetorically, the ghastly circumstances of that condition, but he concludes, and, as it were, locks his sentences together by a touch of the purest poetry, and 'so he stands painted among his armed ancestors !' His armed ancestors ! That single word, that short epithet, builds up for us in an instant a feudal castle, frowning with all its towers above the Danube or the Rhino, with its wide halls, its sounding corridors, its stately picture-galleries filled with the masterpieces of Albert Darer, of Idolbein, and the like. We know further how, in the midst of men and women who seemed to move and breathe along its walls, that fearful shadow in the midst was even then mocking at their false pretences to life. We know how the bereaved mother and forlorn sisters knelt continually beneath, praying for the repose of the

dead, and hew the shuddering vassals crossed themselves as they

passed. We know all this; but we road it by a light which lives and spreads within, as soon as it has been kindled for us from without. And therefore I go on to say that we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a great rhetorician, no doubt, but also in that of a genuine poet. Nay, so completely does the innermost poetry of a line lie in the soul, and not in the outward form of words, that the very same passage may be high poetry or simple prose according to the suggestions which it involves. When Ariel, in answer to Prosporo's inquiries as to how it is possible that the affections of a man injured as he had been should be touched by the misery of his foes, replies at once, mine would, air, were they human,' nothing can be more unpretending than this brief speech considered as to its form of expression ; but what interminable insights does it not open out into the world of spirits, and the infinite gradations of being !"

We have stated Sir F. Doyle's rather vague theory as plainly as we could, and given Isis own illustration, but we confess that we are but little satisfied with it. Of course, it is true that a single touch, awakening a distinct chord of feeling, if it be the right chord, will often add indefinitely to the beauty of a poem ; and that the slighter the touch, the more secret the hand which awakens new life in us, the greater the effect, if it be adequate to its purpose. Concentration of power is always tantamount to an increase of power, if the concentration of power is not beyond the popular apprehension. But is there any truth in saying that the distinctive feature of the poetic method is delineation by suggestion rather than delineation in fall? Or if there is, what precisely is meant by the suggestive method ? Is there anything specially suggestive, as distinguished from fully delineative, in Wordsworth's celebrated description of the owls of Windermere, or of the boy listening to the hootings which he had provoked ?—

Many a time At evening, when the earliest stars began To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, he would stand alone Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake, And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth Uplifted, ho, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls That they might answer hint. And they would shout Across the watery vale and shout again, Responsive to his cal( with quivering peals And long halloos and screams and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled ; concourse wild Of jocund din ! And when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill.'

Then sometimes in that silence while ho hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents, or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind, With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received

Into the bosom of the steady lake."

The lines we have italicized, though not the finest in the passage, are very fine, and singularly full in the form and detail of their expression ; and even the finest conception of all, that "gentle shock of mild surprise " which " carried fininto his heart the voice of mountain torrents,"—a conception which derives some of its power from a suggested likeness between the heart and the depths of a mountain cavern, does not seem to us to owo its force to the brief concentration of the image, so much as to the truth and vividness and freshness of the illustration it conveys of the vast difference between the relative depth of different external impressions on the mind of the observer,—some sinking " far " into the heart, where others, for no observable reason, only just touch, and linger on, the surface. We doubt exceedingly if Sir Francis Doyle's canon as to the necessary suggestiveness of the poetic style will hold water. Some poets, and no doubt the finest, are eminently concentrated and suggestive in their use of words, but even they, on fitting occasions, and those often the highest occasions, discover a style of "linked sweetness long drawn out" to suit a thought of the same nature. Others, again, though poets of a higher order, seldom use the pregnant, almost always the elaborate style. Surely the essence of poetry does not consist in such a distinction as this ? We suspect that the test of poetry consists in its power to express the greatest fullness of life appropriate to the particular theme, which of course, again, will be generally measured by its power to awaken that fullness of life in the finest and richest natures to which it appeals.

We have exhausted our space in criticizing the least perfect, and therefore the most criticizable of Sir Francis Doyle's three lectures, with little allusion to the second and finest of the three, and none to the third. But all three lectures are full of thoughtful discrimination and fine insight : while the lecture on 'Provincial Poetry' seems to us singularly true, eloquent, and instructive.