PAINFUL POETRY.

THE merits and demerits of painful poetry—of poetry;.. that is, which wounds, lacerates, and depresses the human heart instead of raising or satisfying or ennobling—

form a perpetual controversy. There has never yet been an

epoch in the world's history when men have not asked in. some form the question which doubtless will be asked by many of our readers to-day in regard to the fine but intensely painful poem by Mr. Stephen Phillips, which we publish in another part of our issue,—" What right has a poet to make us so miserable, and so hopelessly miserable F—What good does it do to dwell upon these painful subjects ? " It may be

interesting or useful, so the argument will continue, to notice the dreadful effect on the hearts of the poor of their squalid surroundings, but such inquiries are for the social pathologist, and not for the poet. The poet ought to strive to make life harmonious, not to bring its shuddering discords into an awful prominence. Sir Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesy" speaks of the poet by his divine art luring age from the chimney corner and child- hood from its toys and games, and tells us how the old ballad of "Chevy Chase" stirred his blood like a trumpet. Who could. be lured from the chimney corner, much less from toys and games, by the degraded, the hopeless, the helpless miseries of the gutter? Let the poet at any rate fly the gloom and the squalor, and seek the sunlight on the grass or the shadow of star-proof elms. He at least may leave to others the sanitary problems and the social controversies, and keep his eyes on the fields and flowers, and on the human face divine.—not the inhuman face sodden, deadened, and degraded. Words-

worth has told us, in the poet's epitaph, what we have a right to look for from the poet. He should 'murmur near the

running brooks a music sweeter than their own ;" for he-

" Both Man and Boy.

Has been an idler in the land, Contented if he might enjoy, The things that others understand."

The poet's function is to soothe, to soften, and to make us, happy, to add to the pleasures, not to increase and render more poignant the pains, of life.

Such is the view of those, and they are many, who bold,

that the poet should be solely, as it were, the skylark of life. —should rise from the dull brown furrows of the world and

sing in clear air the notes that may make life melodious.. This is not, let us say at once, our view of the poet's sole function. But before we pat forth our own view, let us first see what can be, and is, said in reply by those who most directly traverse the " skylark " notion of the poet, and believe that a poem cannot rightly be condemned merely because it is painful and deals with anguish and distress,—because it "bites into the live man's flesh for parchment," and shows us life in its most sorrow-com- pelling moods. The apology for painful poetry was never better put than by Marston, that gloomy, tragic, and satiric genius of the Elizabethan stage, who delighted to turn his eyes upon the dark places of human existence. In the mag- nificent prologue to Antonio's Revenge, the blank verse of which is as majestic and as strong as anything which even that age produced, Marston faced the detractors of painful verse, and hurled at them with scorn the accusation that they dared not look at human life as a whole, that they feared to see things as they are, and that they wished to pretend that the world was something different from what it really is. He warns his audience that if they are unable to endure the truth, and to come face to face with the realities of life they must avoid his play :—

" l■f. any spirit breathes within this round,

Incapable of weighty passion (As from his birth being hugged in the arms And nuzzled 'twixt the breasts of happiness), Who winks and shuts his apprehension up, From common sense of what men were, and are, Who would not know what men must be, let such Hurry amain from our black visaged shows : We shall affright his eyes. But if a breast Nailed to the earth with grief, if any heart, Pierced through with anguish, pant within this ring, If there be any blood whose heat is choked And stifled with true sense of misery,

If aught of these strains fill this consort up—

They arrive most welcome."

Marston's is, in truth, the modern apology for realism, for painful, brutal, soul-stabbing realism, put not with the

elamminess and heartlessness of the modern defenders of realism, but with that passion and inspiration which mark the age which produced the beginnings of the Puritan spirit.

He asks the world to look on human misery, not because .morbid anatomy belongs as much to science as the anatomy of the healthy body, or because it is essentially curious and interesting and part of a whole, but because it touches the mass of mankind, because it is the destiny of most men, and so speaks to them heart to heart. We are as little satisfied with this pessimistic view of the poet's function or with the modern realist's view, as with that which regards the poet merely as a human skylark. Though joy-giving is one, perhaps the most essential, part of the poet's function, we do not contend for a moment that the poet can be limited to the joyous side of life. The notion is manifestly false, for it would at once rule out all the great tragic poets of the world. Painful poetry always has had, and of course always will have, a great place in literature. But though this must be admitted by all, we hold that "painful poetry "—the phrase is barbarous, but it is difficult to find another that will fit so well—should be limited by two conditions. We believe that the poet's main function is to harmonise life for us, to give

us the solution of the discords. But this does not preclude him from dealing with life, does not invite him to "wink and shut his apprehension up," or to refrain from learning what men were and are and what they must be. Rather it compels him to turn his eyes to those who are "nailed to

the earth with grief," and whose blood is choked and stifled with misery, and to try to find some hope, some solution for their sorrows. . The poet evokes the emotions of pity and terror in us, but when be does so it is not that those emotions should rend us and leave us hopeless and wretched. He raises those emotions but only to allay and to satisfy them.

He purges the passions by showing us the true results, the inner meanings, of human action. Take the tragedy of Lear. Pity and terror are evoked, but the play does not leave us hopeless and unsatisfied, since Lear's phrenzied sophistry and wild injustice have met with their due and inevitable reward. Again, Cordelia's self-sacrifice and nobility of heart save the play from being a mere picture of the retribution that waits upon those who trifle with life. We are glad to be human beings because of Cordelia. Even when the wheel "has come full circle," and Cordelia dies, we may rejoice that, after all, man is a noble, not an

ignoble, animal. We have taken that from the play which may "quiet us in a death so noble." It is, we confess, different with Othello. There the poet, in the hot pursuit of his story, has raised the storm, but forgot to quell it. He lets Iago work his will like one of the evil and uncontrolled forces of Nature. He ects like "hunger, anguish, or the sea," and ruins noble lives from intrinsic, insensate, inexplicable, malignity. There is nothing to quiet us in this death. Thus, though Othello is so full of great poetry, it is not a great poem. He—the old Scotch gentleman told of by Mr. Stevenson—was a sound critic who would not read beyond the first act. He would not endure to hear how, without purpose or result, two noble lives were ruined by a villain. It is true, no doubt, that in real life " demi-devils "like Iago destroy men's happiness as if they were an evil blight ; but such incidents, when heightened by the inspiration of poetry, and yet not moralised and so made able to purify the emotions they arouse are derogations,-not uses, of the poet's function. There is yet another way in which painful poetry can be, and is, amply justified. We will never admit that the poet is the mere decorative artist,—the man who uses the delicate hues of word and phrase merely to give delight. The good poet must also be the good citizen, and do his special service to the State. Part of that service, as we have more than once pointed out in these columns, is to act as interpreter,—to make the nation understand itself, and realise through the quick, living, breathing channels of emotion what it is needing and how it should act. In the performance of this function the poet must often draw the attention of men to the darker side of life and deal with what is painful,—must arouse feeling which at first sight it may seem mere useless torture to arouse. Of this kind is Mr. Phillips's poem of "The Woman with the Dead Soul." He there shows the nation what comes of the conditions under which the poor too often live in our great cities,—how the misery and squalor and the absence of anything beautiful or quickening to the emotions may atrophise the soul. It is well that these things should be known, for only by their being known can a remedy be found. The poet who by his art drags them into the light, and who after fusing them with the plastic fire of imagination forges an arrow that smites our hearts and wounds us, is doing a great and a truly poetic work, even if for the momen• he does not allay the pity and terror he has raised, but leave: them to tear us as their prey. In such cases we grant thal the passions need and should have no purification until some- thing has been done to allay the evil. Note, too, that the poem is also justified as a poem not merely by the moral purpose which is behind it, but by the treatment. The sense of lofty imagination in which it is conceived and worked out does much to mitigate the depression and pain it pro- duces. These qualities cannot, it is true, remove the ache at the heart caused by the poem, but they prevent the tragedy being squalid and hideous. They make it a poetic incident. Mr. Phillips does not merely hurl a sad story at our heads. He remembers that a poem which is not shot through with the sense of beauty in word, in phrase, in imagery, in sound, in measure, is no poem, and he has wisely elaborated his tragedy of the mean, sad streets of London as carefully as if he were writing an idyll of the river or the upland. A poem must never be ugly nor without imagination, deal with what it may. And here Mr. Phillips has done a notable thing, and set, we hope, a notable example. He has shown that a poet can deal poetically and imaginatively with modern life in what is appa- rently its most hideous and unpoetic form. But in truth, as every poet should know, there is virtually nothing human that is not poetic if appropriately touched. It is the poet who makes the poetry, not the thing he writes of.

If, then, we are right in what we have said as to painful poetry, Mr. Phillips's poem is fully justified. Though it is not justified by allaying and satisfying the passions it arouses, it is justified as a work of high imaginative interpretation. Tennyson has told us that-

" The song that stirs a nation's heart Is in itself a deed."

But the nation's heart must be stirred not merely to do battle with a physical foe, but to remedy every evil. Since Mr. Phillips's poem helps to stir the nation's heart, and to make us strive to render our city life less deadening and de- grading to the mind, he may claim to have done a deed and

one worthy of a poet. And to do this he has used the true poet's gift. Imagination is stamped on every line of the poem, and is interwoven with its very fibre. He has not given us a flourish of rhetoric here and there or sandwiched prose with poetry, but made every phrase sound with the ring of the true gold. If, then, for the time, and with intent to stir us to consider how soul-killing is our city life in its more sordid aspects, he does not purge and purify the emotions be raises, he at least does satisfy one emotion,—the emotion which responds to melody of verse, felicity of diction, and appropriateness of phrase.