| It
may be an easy thing to look back over the long range
of our poetical literature and pick out a favourite
here and there, but when it comes to a decision as to
supreme greatness there ensues a wide difference of
opinion. From Chaucer and Spenser down to Browning,
Tennyson, Arnold and Swinburne stretch a great host
of names that stand for work that will not easily perish.
Though not deemed great in his own age, Shakespeare,
in this age, is by common consent acknowledged to be
the king of English poets, the one supreme mind whose
genius has glorified the language to which it belongs.
If this general opinion concerning Shakespeare is true,
might it not be well to ask ourselves what are the special
qualities that lift him to this supreme place in literature?
The common answer would be that it is his great dramatic
power that makes him supremely great. But we might again
ask, in what does this dramatic power consist? And the
answer to this question would be that it is made up
of many qualities, each of which would endow a lesser
genius. In other words he must have contained in himself
all the essential qualities that go to make a great
poet, such as unpralleled insight into human life, both
as regards his own time and also in past history, so
as to render human any history he touched. Then he must
have had a remarkable fecundity to have produced all
he did, and his range is so wide as to embrace all types
of humanity met with in any age. In all of these lie
his supreme greatness, not to speak of a wonderful gift
of expression. Many poets have a deep insight into nature
or into a certain type or class of humanity, but in
Shakespeare we find a universality, if I might use such
a word, that is found in no other writer. When we try
to apply this test to the other great English poets
the decision as to supreme greatness becomes difficult.
All genius, whether it be that of a Wordsworth or a
Byron, calls for our homage, and to deny the one or
the other does not harm the greatness we ignore; we
but clip the wings of our own humanity to that extent.
I would dare to say that for genuine greatness as a
poet Coleridge comes next to Shakespeare in the language
but there would be many who would prefer some other
singer. There are those who elevate Wordsworth to this
position, but to do so would be to revolutionise all
literature and to strip poetry of her lyrical and dramatical
qualities and make mere philosophy usurp the divinity
of song. In short it were to strip Shakespeare himself
of his supreme greatness. The great glory of poetry
in all ages is not mere thought; it is creation which
leads to inspiration. In this Homer will always be greater
than Plato and Shakespeare than Bacon. A man may be
a great thinker and not be a great poet. Philosophy
is worked out, song is inspired. Philosophy deals with
problems, song with ideals. Philosophy deals with history,
song with men; and where the one agonises to seek for
what it calls the truth the other contents itself with
the beauty that is ever present and always enjoys what
the other ever desires in vain. Philosophy lays bare
where poetry clothes; and herein is where poetry is
in the highest sense spiritual. A man may clothe in
delicate language some philosophical thought and yet
not be a great poet. The poet is first and last a creator.
He does not need to moralise; his creation speaks for
itself. The greatest English poets have been in their
highest moments of this order. A certain class of poets,
such as Matthew Arnold and Emerson, have, with a philosophical
tendency, idealised history, they have attempted to
poetise the philosophy of history, but great as they
are as thinkers they have failed as poets in the highest
sense. They recognise man as a unit in history, but
knew nothing of him as a living soul; at least not in
the dramatic sense, as Shakespeare did.
C.
There
is nothing more exasperating to the free lover of this
earth than the spectacle of a placard stuck up in front
of a plain pasture field or bit of inviting woodland,
bearing some such legend as this: "No trespassing
on this property!" Now, to the scientist, the artist
and the poet, this earth belongs to no man in particular;
everything that he treads upon is his for the moment,
and wherever the ground is not encumbered with the actual
flesh and impedimenta of the owner he proposes to go
at will. To the owner of forest and field, I would say
that if he find any poor soul illegal using his property
for an hour of innocent research or quiet reflection,
and be moved to institute against him the rigors of
the law, let him first ascertain what manner of man
the offender is, and if he belong to any of the classes
mentioned above, let him be careful to leave him alone,
for it may chance that he has made more out of that
land for the benefit of mankind than the owner or all
his descendants will ever do. Moreover, if he is of
the true stock he is incorrigible, anyway, and will
go where he will no matter what you do.
L.
Now
is the season of the splendor of the fields. The gardens
are heavy with the breath of the syringa and the meadows
with the perfume of clover. Everywhere the hayfields
are floated over with the stars of marguerite and buttercup;
we find the bladder-campion and blue-eyed grass in the
meadows, and in the deep pine woods the twin flowers
intense with perfume and the fair little honey-scented
sanilacina. Now it is that in the long afternoons we
dream of some place of wind and flowers,
Full
of sweet trees and color of glad grass,
and
find it if we can, for we know now with the fullest
intensity of sympathy that we are of one birth with
everything about us, brethren to the trees and kin to
the very grass that now, even at noon in the shadowy
places, flings the dew about our feet.
L.
The
reviewers of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's "Ballads and
Barrack Room Ballads" have made mention of their
astonishing force and freedom, but I have nowhere discovered
the statement that they are pleasant reading. I think
I have a genuine appreciation for Mr. Kipling's best
work, whether in prose or verse, but the failings of
both are similar, and for my own part I could have wished
them different. Mr. Kipling is a genius, and one of
a very positive quality. It is impossible to mistake
his distinctive touch; after having read one of his
tales the virile and incisive power and the direct forethought
stroke are recognisable in every thing he writes. But
with all this genius there is mixed a coarseness like
the coarseness of a man who despises nature, something
sceptical and rude and sinister, something vulgar, born
of the unlicensed passions. The glory in the description
of what is merely effete in society may have arisen
from the surroundings of his early life, but the note
is too constant to be passed over in silence. The power
with which he describes human suffering and human bloodshed
an the ease with which he addresses himself to the task
are equally remarkable. In half a dozen of his best
tales and in a very few of his ballads these qualities
are entirely absent, but when it comes to a question
of deciding upon the main mass of his work these characteristics
are too strong to be glossed over. And the final question
with reference to Mr. Kipling's work, as well as every
other man's, is, Does it give pleasure? This question
every one will answer for himself, and I must say that
the qualities which I have mentioned above as almost
ever present are to me intensely disturbing and disagreeable.
There is hardly a ballad in this new book which has
not some violent barbarity of expression, some rude
thrust that unsettles the mind. It is no palliation
to say that the strokes are forcible and often tragically
powerful; it is no consolation to a man who has been
thrashed to think that the beating was well and deftly
done. It is too unnerving to meet in a ballad which,
although admittedly free, does not always sink to the
level of my quotation, that a certain warrior behaved
in this fashion:—
He
crucified noble, he sacrificed mean,
He filled
old ladies with kerosene.
It
is, I say, unnerving to meet with such things, for they
are neither humorous nor powerful, and they rather degrade
than otherwise. I might muliply examples, but another
will be sufficient:—
I
had nailed his ears to my capstan head, and ripped them
off with a saw,
And soused them in the bilge water, and served them
to him raw.
I had stripped his hide for my hammock side, and tasseled
his beard i' the mesh,
And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through
the gangrened flesh.
It
is useless to ask whether this is fitting in its place;
the question is, Is it pleasant reading? Certain of
the barrack room ballads have a humorous quality, notably
the one "Tommy," and, in common with their
companions, they have a swing and a bounding rhythm
that is as free and forcible as the wind. I can only
regret, for my own part, that the wind which bears Mr.
Kipling's message had not passed over more fragrant
hollows and hills and had come less often laden with
the scent of blood and fire.
S.
It
is a noticeable fact that the greatest poets, those
few who are eminent above all others for dignity and
majesty of tone, have been men of affairs before they
were poets, and that those men who have been poets only
have belonged, however illustrious, to the second class.
Eschylus was a soldier and an active patriot before
he was a poet. The speech that came naturally to his
tongue was not the mere utterance of the brilliant playwright.
Active participation in great national efforts and the
experience of battle and victory were necessary to awaken
and confirm in the poet of Agamemnon that mood and note
of rugged, sustained sublimity. The mind of Dante, trained
in the great cares of statecraft, studying and experiencing
the vicissitudes of an active and dangerous time, became
capable of the Divina Comedia. Our own Milton could
never have written Paradise Lost had he not first been
the friend and assistant of Cromwell and concerned in
the mighty cares and the proud cause of the Commonwealth.
The mood of soul that he learned in those full years
of thought and labor and intense experience is the mood
of Paradise Lost—grand, ingenuous, austere. If
the youth of Byron could have been bred in the hardening
atmosphere of great affairs instead of being given over
to foppery and dissipation, if the Greek revolution
had called him earlier, or if he had lived longer and
passed through periods of strenuous deeds and important
purposes, he might have given to England a poet more
splendidly fruitful, if not so mighty of tongue as Milton.
L.
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