Professional Poetry

IN old times, when, if legends say true, to be a poet was to wander in the guise of a divine beggar amid the isles of Greece, or to ride as a troubadour in the lists of Love’s court, or to sit, snowy-bearded, in the minstrel’s corner of some baron’s hall, following the Muses was rather a sort of angelic gypsying than a profession; or, if the phrase seems light, it was the career merely of a blessed mendicant. In the classical age, manuscripts had already brought about some modifications in the habits of the strollers, and the printingpress at last effectually put an end to all that. Poetry, divorced from song to the popular comprehension, turned into literature ; and, with the many changes involved in and accompanying this, it came about that, instead of winning bread perhaps the more readily by waking some familiar strain, now the poet had to make a new song to get a new alms. Publishers, too, took the place of musical instruments as the necessary complement of the text; and, not to speak it profanely, since by common report poets have found them by no means “ easier to be played on than a pipe,” the calling has no longer that fine indifference to mortal circumstance which gave it character when the favorite of the gods was honored of all men. Yet in the old notion that the poet was inspired of heaven, and to give him food was an obligation both of religion and courtesy, there was this of truth, —the perception that the high gifts of the spirit have no relation to reputation or livelihood, or any of the respectabilities, the forms and shews, of the world, but are separate and apart ; and there was also this of good as well, — that the poets, though the best of them shared in the weakness of our nature, were kept somewhat by this fiction of the sacer vates from any degradation of the art to routine uses. But did not Homer sing for his supper, and Spenser for a place at court? — this one for his laurel, that one for the gold beaker, and that other for some laughing Lalage ? Let it be so ; the old tradition, the idle fancy, serve to set in bolder relief the book-making, moneygetting, reputation-sustaining, in a word the professional poets, of the modern time ; for, if it be not altogether a new thing, certainly to a greater degree now than ever before do the acknowledged poets, the “ kings of song,” exercise their power out of mere habit, because they have always made verses and published them at tolerably regular intervals.

The three leading poets of England have this year simultaneously given the world evidence, one cannot say of their genius, but of their craft; and the three volumes taken together are a fair test of what may be called professionalism in poetry, under the very best circumstances of native talent, cultivated art, and wide knowledge of the affairs of men. Two of the authors are now old men, and the third is no novice in life: with the former, if at all, we might expect

and with the latter has been associated for many years that power of youth which, in poets, seems independent of time. Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne are names so deeply graved in the memory of men that it would require very excellent work indeed to make them more lasting. It will hardly be expected that these new poems can add to their fame, and therefore none need grudge the friendly liberty if one who is less a critic than a looker-on, in our literary republic, treats them not so much for what they are as for what they illustrate; nor need any find disparagement in comparisons of old with new, odious as such methods of examination are, for to mark a difference will not, in this case, be to suggest a fault. Professionalism in poetry may be worth as frank discussion as professionalism in athletics, for example : it is not in the breed of sporting-men alone that our civilization diverges from that which flowered and seeded in the games of each Olympiad.

On the first pages of Browning’s volume ¹ there is a difference to be noted. Instead of invoking any Muses or other gods, as in the days when the world was young, our poet, in a wholly modern way, addresses the reader, and hands him a bill of fare, literally speaking. It is a handsome bill of fare, faultless in technique, with a certain piquancy of its own in the way of rhyme, — “ Italy ” with “ Spit ally,” for instance, — and of a roughened, acrid metre ; it is written over, too, with epicure viands, and seems almost to exhale odors of appetizing cookery ; in fact, it is a receipt for preparing ortolans (apparently after the manner of the Maison Delapierre, Gressoney St. Jean, Val d’Aosta), and it is used in the old-fashioned scriptural way as a parable, of which the interpretation runs, “ Reader, you have in these poems a dish of ortolans à la Italienne; if you know how to eat those, you will know how to read these. Robert Browning, prandens.” We have not dined at Gressoney on the

but we understand the similitude, and have read the Fancies by the help of our second-hand knowledge of the ortolan roast, as the poet petitions. This prologue, we thus discovered, was really in excellent taste, —was an artistic necessity, indeed; for Ferishtah, the dervish, whose wisdom is here preserved, poetized, or rather preached, after this manner, in parables, and out of such occupations as eating apples or cherries, or cutting up melons, or sowing “a beanstripe,” drew the honey of sound moral reflections. One might say, if he had the courage to make such a sweeping inference as would seem to denote a member of the Browning Society, that in this prologue the master struck the keynote of these poems by showing how the highest philosophic thought, the eternal lessons of God’s being and man’s duty, reside in the commonest and most trivial objects and affairs of daily existence. You have but to look at your plate when dining, and lo, there is truth! That suggestion is perhaps a trifle esoteric for these pages: such, however, was Ferishtah’s method, and hence there is a propriety in his English sponsor’s attempt to do likewise, though one cannot help thinking he would have orientalized more successfully if he had chosen some simple thing, like a cherry, or an apple, or a melon, as Ferishtah does, rather than an epicure’s dish. But indigestibility, after all, seems an essential part of the matter, in both ortolans and verses, to his own stomach. It takes, let us remark in passing, a very sophisticated poet — no warbler of native wood-notes wild — to describe himself, even half in jest, as Apollo’s caterer.

In attending thus to the prologue at considerable length we have really been writing with a side glance at the poems themselves. They consist of the moralizing allegories in narrative, familiar as an Eastern form of literature, supplemented by short lyrical pieces, which usually give an emotional echo of the truth which has just been elaborated in a purely rational way. How Browning reasons in verse is well known ; since Dryden no one has done it so well, at least in point of intellectual as distinguished from literary form. It is thoroughly understood, too, that his disquisitions are more highly prized by seekers after instruction than by the lovers of mere poetry. The thought is of course conservative, and it deals principally with modern problems (ancient, too, for that matter) of theology and religion : evil, prayer, anthropomorphism, asceticism, truth, and the like. Criticism of the substance of this does not belong under poetry, since there is essentially no appeal to the æsthetic faculty, but only to the reason ; and this can be said more unreservedly than is usual even with this author’s work, for in his later books there has been none so exclusively intellectual in its interest as is the present one. And here, incidentally, we come upon a feature of professionalism in poetry, — upon what, in default of better terms, we may call a substitution of routine in execution for a living art. So a lawyer has a certain amount of office work which is dispatched by the help of formulas and legal blanks; or a clergyman writes a sermon, perhaps, when he is tired, by the help of other formulas and theological blanks. The characteristic of such work is that it is done mechanically. A poet, if he has been well trained, has the same resources, not only in the poetical blanks of verse-form, the set terms of his distinctive vocabulary, the fixed style of various manners, dramatic, elegiac, narrative, but more subtly in the very form of his customary thought. To come to the case in hand, Browning has, as a practiced craftsman, obtained a certain command which makes it impossible for him to fall below a definite and high excellence in expression, and thus he is always both facile and sure; but, beyond that, he has also developed habits of reasoning, so that his intellect is a mould, and, no matter what goes into it, always gives out the same form of thought. In other words, there is something fairly to be described as mechanical in his thinking as well as in his handling; there is an intellectual routine in his works, — the hardened, ossified form of what was once a fluid and vital art. Students of his poetry perceive at once that the subjects, the themes, of the present volume are accidental ; he would have written as well, as profitably, on any other matter of intellectual interest, and he would have said essentially the same thing. Ferishtah’s Fancies is, without any disrespect or disparagement, merely a poetic blank filled in. As in the case of other professions, the value lies in the filling in ; sometimes its worth is more, sometimes less. What it is in this case will depend largely on the patience and religious prepossessions of the persons to whom the paper comes. Merely as a professional poem, however, Ferishtah’s Fancies is a fine illustration of routine thinking; and truly, in the present dearth of inspired thought, men have reason to be grateful that it is so excellent, — to recur to the prologue, “ excellent i’ faith —you cannot feed capons so.”

In Swinburne’s collection,² the mechanical element, one need hardly say, is limited to the verse-forms, the vocabulary, and the style, and is, in fact, with difficulty to be distinguished from the mere mannerism of his hand. The facility of Swinburne, the flow and sonorousness of his lines, are so overpowering that frequently one has to read them over, and by a distinct and painful effort neglect the emphasis and cadence in order to get at the idea; and in this last volume the double reading is as necessary as ever. The confusion of sense by words, as heretofore, has now and then a comical touch, as, to take a striking example, in the line,

or in the attack on the method of modern biography (by means of private letters), that enables all to

one would as lief read the dictionary as lines like that, so far as poetic charm is concerned. But these are the familiar traits of one who is, notwithstanding, our most passionate and musical poet. The range of his new verses is much more varied than Browning’s; but it is curious that the series of lyrics which gives the title to the volume is somewhat similar in form to the parables of Ferishtah, since it consists of a number of descriptions of seaside views, each of which concludes with an emotional echo of the scene in the final stanzas. After this group comes the inevitable ode to Victor Hugo, with a foot-note list of the works alluded to in the text, as if that would make the poem more intelligible to one who was unfamiliar with them beforehand ; and the usual variety of elegiac, infantile, and political effusions fills out the book. Swinburne’s memorial stanzas are among the best of his work, and those on Mazzini, in this collection, do not fall below the standard they ought to reach to do honor to such a man. So, too, though he has written more finely of children than in the NineYear-Old Ode, and has put forth more stirring political verses than any of these in which he sings the crusade against the peers, — “ O Lords, our Gods,” — there is a sweetness and freshness in the former, a fervor and scorn in the latter, which show that the force of his genius is by no means spent. The line called out by the Tennyson ennoblement, —

opens with the majesty of one of Milton’s sonnets.

Nevertheless, the volume as a whole owes much of the pleasure it gives to the pleasure it recalls. The level of the flight is not so high as it was, though the grace of the movement, the bend downward, the slow circlings, the strong upward soaring, attest the same eagle of song. There has been much aspersion on Swinburne’s genius, and some of late in this country particularly; but one might as well deny the beauty of the leopard’s skin because of its spots. In remarking, therefore, that this last volume is somewhat tame, in comparison with what has come before from his pen, we do not mean to join in the common censure of him as a mindless, babbling versifier, nor to point even by implication at the fact that the worship of childhood seems to have displaced that of womanhood, in his poetry ; but there is a lack of vigor, a lassitude of the imaginative faculty, a paucity even of fancy, in which he was once so affluent. It is seldom, indeed, in these pages that one sees in the way of mere fancy such a faëry touch as in the sonnet On the Death of Richard Doyle : —

though in this one poem there are other lines as delicately done. It is much more seldom that there is any brief lyric burst to recall the chorus singer of the Atalanta and the Erechtheus. Swinburne’s genius depends on the imagination primarily, as Browning’s does on the intellect, and the imagination will not work mechanically ; even when it seems to do so, as in Moore’s oriental poems, or in Young’s religious meditations, or in Wordsworth’s ecclesiastical sonnets, it is hardly worthy of the name, and the region of its exercise by these poets is far from Swinburne’s demesne. It involves a much more severe drain on a man’s genius to write imaginative poetry periodically than reflective poetry ; and while Swinburne has written as many volumes, perhaps, as Browning, in spite of his fewer years, he has not been able to keep the same level of excellence in his own work that Browning has maintained ; and the facility that he has as a master in the profession, instead of assisting his make-believe, has really been of the fatal kind that smooths the Avernian descent. If there must be a new book of verses each year, an imaginative poet has little opportunity to select ; he must print nearly all he writes that reaches respectability. It is under this necessity that in this volume, as in nearly all the previous ones, is included so much that is not distinctively either good or bad ; but in the case of lyrical poetry, not to be excellent is to fail. Professionalism favors mediocrity in a man by cultivating content with what he is usually able to work out day by day, instead of discontent with all save what he can achieve at the full height of his nature in some fortunate moment; and hence for the true lyrist it is a snare. So far as this volume is the utterance of self-stirred genius, it is worthy of the shelf where the Laus Veneris is ; so far as it is the perfunctory handicraft of a professed poet, it should have straw and stubble for its resting-place. When Swinburne wishes to write a book merely for the book’s sake, let him try his hand at another Bothwell.

Tennyson has been so faithful to his art that no one could harbor the thought that he has ever written except from the inner impulse, or published except in the perfectest form of which he was at the time capable. His new drama, Becket,³ is finished with painstaking care, and if it fails of the immortality of In Memoriam it will be because the author is not a dramatic poet. In his early verse he gave no sign of having in him the capacities of a playwright, and as his genius rounded out and put forth power in the various provinces of poetry there was no indication of his being one of Elizabeth’s men. It was felt to be hazardous when he gave the world Harold and Queen Mary; and now, though Becket is stronger, finer, more instinct with manliness, than were the earlier two, it is not certain that, had he begun thus, he would have won fame by this road. Distinction, certainly, he would have gained, but the three dramas together would never have seated him in the House of Lords ; nor any number like them. Becket is in a sense a powerful play, with beauty and a touch of humor (so meant, at least), and a certain roughened realism in some of its character details ; it has incident, situation, dialogue and monologue, passion and pathos, an extraordinary variety in mood, sentiment, and setting, and yet it does not make on the mind an impression either of character or of poetry at all comparable to the least of Shakespeare’s plays, or, in our judgment, to the best of some smaller men than Tennyson, who breathed Shakespeare’s air. Becket himself is a great subject; there is none finer, and it has attracted poets of large ambition before this; the men, the scene, the events, seem built for the purposes of tragedy. But a man of dramatic imagination does not need all this help from history ; he can take a nameless Italian novella, and make its tale of more consequence to humanity than all the lives of all the Archbishops of Canterbury. Becket is wonderfully perfect in its handling, in its phrase, its contrasts, its subordinations to the essential unity, its management of groups, its strokes of climax,— in all the things that art knows of and can create ; and being so perfect as it is in these ways, one wonders why it should not impress the mind as much as some plays infinitely inferior to it in mere construction. Tennyson has mastered the theory of the drama; and we are told that if we do not enjoy his creations in this province of poetry, if we do not value the self-suppression which has not allowed one quotable line to stand out from others, and similar virtues dear to the theorist, we are wrong. Perhaps that is just the trouble. Shakespeare has so spoilt us that we will have no drama that is not romantic, that does not enchain us by a thousand wefts as well as by one main event. If Tennyson were a born dramatist, he would not have cared to inquire whether he fulfilled the academic ideal of what a drama should be. He would have written one, and shamed the schools. Becket has the perfection, the color, composition, and incident of a fine historic painting ; it has the dignity of a noble narrative told in tableaux ; but it has not the spirit of the life itself. It is cold, limited, literary. It is presumably a part of the plan that there should be, as we have said, no quotable line, nor any fine passage that sings itself into the memory by its mere beauty. The attention is concentrated upon the action, and hence it may be expected that on the stage and to the eye the drama would be more effective. But this severe simplicity, this merciless pruning of all the graces of poetic expression, require the genius of another race to appreciate it. It was not Shakespeare’s way. It is as certain as any such thing can be by internal evidence that Tennyson had no call to write this work except the ambition natural to so finely endowed a mind. Here, if anywhere, will the future trace in him the flawing influence of the poetic calling when followed for ends at variance with those dictated, to use the old phrase, by the god within. To say that Becket is a tour de force, as will be commonly said, is to set it entirely apart, in Tennyson’s work, from In Memoriam, The Ballads, and The Idyls. There is more of England’s heart in the song of Sir Richard Grenville’s fight, more of man’s life in Rizpah, than in the whole of Becket. In the two former the secret is inspiration ; in the last, is it, or is it not, professionalism? The consummate excellence of craft, even to the premeditated carelessness in details now and then, is here ; is there essentially anything more ?