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Essays - On Mystic Realism
‘On Mystic Realism: A Note for the Adept’ originally appeared at the end of Buchanan’s The Drama of Kings, published in November, 1871, serving as an explanation of the preceding work. When The Drama of Kings was revised as ‘Political Mystics’ and included in the third volume of the Poetical Works, published by H. S. King in 1874, the essay (minus its subtitle) had also been revised and, appearing in the Appendix to the whole volume, its direct links to The Drama of Kings were removed. These are the two versions:
From The Drama of Kings - pp. 463-471.
ON MYSTIC REALISM:
A NOTE FOR THE ADEPT.
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ON MYSTIC REALISM.
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“Poesie ist das absolut Reelle. Dies ist der Kern meiner Philosophie.
Je poetischer, je wahrer.”—NOVALIS (Schriften, vol. iii. p. 171).
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IN the present work, and in the works which have preceded it from the same pen, an attempt is made to combine two qualities which the modern mind is accustomed to regard apart—reality and mystery, earthliness and spirituality; and this combination, whether a merit or a fault, is a consequence of natural temperament, and perfectly incurable. The writer dropped into a world a few years ago like a being fallen from another planet. His first impression was one of surprise and awe;—he stood and wondered—and here, on the same spot, he stands and wonders still. What is nearest to him seems so sublime, unaccountable, and inexhaustible, and occasionally, indeed, so droll and odd, that he has never ceased to regard it with all the eyes of his soul from that day to this. Others may go to the mountain-tops and interrogate the spheres. Wiser men may peruse the Past, and see there, afar away, the dreamy poetry for which the spirit eternally yearns. More acquiescent men may look heavenward, slowly and strangely losing the habit of earthly perception altogether. With all these, with all who love beauty near or afar away, in any shape or form, abides the twofold blessing of reverence and love. But the Mystic is occupied hopelessly with what immediately surrounds him. Minuter examination leads only to extremer joy 466 and wonder. To him this ever-present reality is the only mystery, and in its mystery lies its sublime fascination and beauty. Only what is most real and visible and certain is marvellous, and only that which is marvellous has the least fascination. What he sees may be seen by every soul under the sun, for it is the soul’s own reflection in the river of life glassed to a mirror by its own speed.
This close examination of human nature from the mystic side is not so common that men will tolerate it calmly. “What is the dullard looking at?” cries the passer-by; “what are these wretched beings who surround him?—costermongers, thieves, magdalen-women, village schoolmasters, nomads,—what is the sentimentalist trying to find among these? He floods them with the light of his own vacant mind, and calls that light their souls!” So the speaker passes on—to the heights of the Alps, perhaps, where he finds communion; God communicating with all men somewhere. A more elaborate person pauses next before the Mystic. “The man is in error,” is his criticism; “he would fain prove himself an artist, but art deals only with things beautiful,—with remote forms of nature, with the dreamy past, with antique turns of thought, with what is essentially exquisite in itself—and it has, moreover, a terminology quite at variance with ordinary speech. Man yearns to the unknown and illimitable, and demands distance in the subjects of his art.” And this other goes his way, grateful to God for Greece and Italy, and for Lessing and Winkelman. Meantime the poor criticised barbarian has not budged. He looks on into the eyes nearest to him, and ah! what distance does he not find there? Approaching each creature as ever from the mystic side, he becomes, in spite of himself, an optimist. The moment he seizes for examination is the divine moment, when the creature under examination—be it Buonaparte or a street-walker, Bismarck or “Barbara Gray”—is at its highest and best, 467 whether that “best” be intellectual beatification or the simple vicarious instinct which merges in the identity of another. He sees the nature spiritualised, in the dim strange light of whatever soul the creature possesses. This light is often very dim indeed, very doubtful—so doubtful that its very existence is denied by non-mystic men whose musings assume the purely spiritual and unimaginative form. But be the teaching true or false, be the light born in the subject examined or in the human sentiment that broods over it, this mystic approach to the creature at his highest point of spiritualisation, this mode of approach which seems unnatural to many because it involves the most minute enumeration of details and the most careful display of the very facts of life which artists try most to conceal, is the only procedure possible to the present writer. The personal key-note to all his work—poor enough, God knows, is all that work from his own point of view—is to be found in the “Book of Orm,” and most of all in the poem entitled “The Man Accurst.”
Imagination is not, as some seem to imply, the power of conjuring up the remote and unknowable, but the gift of realising correctly in correct images the truths of things as they are and ever have been. He who can see no poetry in his own time is a very unimaginative person. The truly imaginative being is he who carries his own artistic distance with him, and sees the mighty myths of life vivid yet afar off, glorified by the truth which is Eternal. How many people can walk out on a starry night, or sit by the side of the sea, unmoved? But let a comet appear, or a star shoot, and they exclaim, “How beautiful!” Let a whale rise up in the water and roar, and they think, “How wonderful are the works of God!” These are the people, and their name is legion, who lack as yet the consecrating gleam of the imagination. As for the Mystic, he needs neither a comet nor a whale to fill his soul with a sense of the wonderful; he needs still less the dark vistas of tradition or the archaic scenery of 468 obscure periods. He comes into the world, as has been said, like a man dropped from the moon, and he walks all his life as among wonderful beings in a strange clime. How far has he not wandered, how far has he not yet to wander?—and every face he sees is turned in the same direction. Faces! how they haunt them with their weird beauty and divine significance! Go where he may, his path swarms with poetic forms. All is glorified and awful. What is nearest seems of all the most sublime and unaccountable. It is with difficulty that he can bear any book or contemplate any painted picture, seeing what books and pictures present themselves in the strangely-coloured lives of his fellow-beings. He turns to history—not in disdain of what exists, but in search of explanation and corroboration, and in order to discover what part of the strange show there is perishable, what part is durable and eternal. Having as he thinks discovered that, he may become a poet, and put on record his own idea or autobiography, written in reference to his own time, but to be used in all after-times as explanatory and corroborative. Homer, the Greek tragedians, Aristophanes, Plato, David and the prophets, the authors of the Sagas and Lieds, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, William Langdale, Chaucer, the ballad-singers of Scotland and England, Ben Jonson, Shakspere, La Fontaine, Burns, Wordsworth, Jean Paul, Balsac, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman,—do we find any of these men, poets all of them, turning away from his own time because it is too uninteresting? or, on the contrary, do we find them penetrating to the very soul of it, stirring to every breath of it, uttering every dream and aspiration of it? Does Dante try to write like Virgil, though he sits at Virgil’s feet? Does Chaucer ape Boccaccio, though he wears the Decameron next his heart? Does Ben Jonson reproduce Plautus or La Fontaine Rabelais? Does Burns, having drunk Scotch ballads into his soul, sing as the ballad-writers sang? Do we find Wordsworth seeking for subjects far 469 back in the dark ages? Has Shelley so little imagination as to reproduce Greek tragedy as it was, or so much imagination as to make of his “Prometheus” a veritable modern poem [in spite of the falsehood and shallowness of the myth it preserves] with a distinctly modern purpose and scope?
“But,” some one again interposes, “this is such an unpoetic age, and the surroundings of modern life are so vulgar.” The writer understands this objection, and there is reason in it. The majority of people find their ordinary associations vulgar and unpoetic, and like to be lured away from them and interested. So much the worse, alas! for the majority. But let it be at once admitted that the poet fails altogether if he fails to lure readers and interest them as they desire. He is no mere moral teacher, but a singer of the beautiful, and his real business in this world is not to join in a chorus raised by any group of people, but to explain some point of beauty which has rested altogether hidden until his advent. If people are unimaginative, he comes to teach them imagination: if people dislike modern subjects, he comes to make them like modern subjects. If ordinary people perceived the sublime mysteries of contemporary life, if ordinary people understood the faces and souls they behold daily, it would be a waste of time to sing to them. If men in general understood the higher historical issues and perceived the higher poetry of the siege of Paris, what good would it be to celebrate it in song? And this poem, for example, fails altogether—is veritably less than nothing—is a futility, a mere wind-bag—if it does not make the reader feel the events it describes as he never, by any possibility, felt them before.
In the “Drama of Kings,” as in “London Poems,” “Inverburn,” and “Meg Blane,” in the presentment of the characters of Buonaparte, Louis Napoleon, and Prince Bismarck,—as in the characters of “Nell,” “Liz,” “Meg Blane,” and the rest,—one point of view is adopted; not 470 the point of view of the satirist, nor that of the politician, nor that of the historian; but that of the realistic Mystic, who, seeking to penetrate deepest of all into the soul, and to represent the soul’s best and finest mood, seizes that moment when the spiritual or emotional nature is most quickened by sorrow or by self-sacrifice, by victory or by defeat. In good honest truth, the writer has had far greater difficulty in detecting the spiritual point in these great leaders than in the poor worms at their feet. The utterly personal moods of arbitrary power, the impossibility of self-abnegation for the sake of any other living creature, the frightful indifference to all ties, the diabolic supremacy of the intellect, make the first Emperor a figure more despairing to the Mystic than the coster girl dying in childbed in a garret, or the defiant woman declaiming over the corpse of her deformed seducer. It is this sense of the superlatively diabolic that has made the author, in the Epilogue, attribute the performance of the three leading characters to Lucifer himself;—only let it be understood not to the irreclaimable and Mephistophelian type of utter evil, but to the Mystic’s Devil, a spirit difficult to fathom individually, but clearly in the divine service working for good. Perhaps, by the way, the supernatural machinery of Prelude and Epilude is a defect, like all allegory; and if the consensus of wise criticism inclines to its condemnation as a defect, it will be obliterated, no author having a right to resist the wish of his readers where their dislike corresponds with a doubt of his own. But if it serves to keep before the reader the fact that the whole action of the drama is seen from the spiritual or divine auditorium, he will not regret its introduction; and in using it without perfect faith, he may plead the example of the greatest poetic sceptic of modern times. No one did fuller justice to mystic truths than the great positivist who wrote the first and second “Fausts.”
Concerning the mere form of the poem and its resemblances 471 to the Greek, little need be said. It is the first serious attempt ever made to treat great contemporary events in a dramatic form and very realistically, yet with something of the massive grandeur of style characteristic of the great dramatists of Greece. In minor points of detail the author is sanguine that it is not at all Greek, nor in any sense of the word archaic. The interest is epic rather than tragic; but what the leading character is to a tragedy France is to the “Drama of Kings,”—a wonderful genius guilty of many sins, terribly overtaken by misfortune, and attaining in the end perhaps to purification. It is unnecessary to add any more by way of explanation, save to say that most of the metrical combinations used in the choruses are quite new to English poetry, and that where a measure is employed which has been used successfully by any previous poet, the fact is chronicled in the notes.
One word in conclusion. For this new experiment in poetic realism, the writer asks no favour but one—a quiet hearing. He has a faint hope that if readers will do him the honour to peruse the work as a whole, and then patiently contemplate the impression left in their own minds, the first feeling of repulsion at an innovation may give place in the end to a pleasanter feeling. Perhaps, however, this is too much to ask from any member of so busy a generation, and he should be grateful to any one who will condescend to read the “Drama” in fragments.
Die Masse könnt ihr nur durch Masse zwingen;
Ein Jeder sucht sich endlich selbst was aus.
Wer vieles bringt, wird manchem etwas bringen,
Und Jeder geht zufrieden aus dem Haus. . . .
Was hilft’s, wenn ihr ein Ganzes dargebracht!
Das Publicum wird es euch doch zerpflücken.
ROBERT BUCHANAN.
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From The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan, Vol. III - pp. 315-324.
ON MYSTIC REALISM.
‘Poesie ist das absolut Reelle. Dies ist der Kern meiner Philosophie. Je poetischer, je wahrer.’—NOVALIS (Schriften, vol. iii. p. 171).
IN the contents of the preceding volumes an attempt is made to combine two qualities which the modern mind is accustomed to regard apart—reality and mystery, earthliness and spirituality; and this combination, whether a merit or a fault, is a consequence of natural temperament, and perfectly incurable. The writer dropped into a world a few years ago like a being fallen from another planet. His first impression was one of surprise and awe;—he stood and wondered—and here, on the same spot, he stands and wonders still. What is nearest to him seems so sublime, unaccountable, and inexhaustible, and occasionally, indeed, so droll and odd, that he has never ceased to regard it with all the eyes of his soul from that day to this. Others may go to the mountain-tops and interrogate the spheres. Wiser men may peruse the Past, and see there, afar away, the dreamy poetry for which the spirit eternally yearns. More acquiescent men may look heavenward, slowly and strangely losing the habit of earthly perception altogether. With all these, with all who love beauty near or afar away, in any shape or form, abides the twofold blessing of reverence and love. But the Mystic is occupied hopelessly with what immediately surrounds him. Minuter examination leads only to extremer joy and wonder. To him this ever-present reality is the only mystery, and in its mystery lies its sublime fascination and beauty. Only what is most real and visible and certain is marvellous, and only that which is marvellous has the least fascination. What he sees may be seen by every soul 316 under the sun, for it is the soul’s own reflection in the river of life glassed to a mirror by its own speed.
This close examination of human nature from the mystic side is not so common that men will tolerate it calmly. ‘What is the dullard looking at?’ cries the passer-by; ‘what are these wretched beings who surround him?—costermongers, thieves, magdalen-women, village schoolmasters, nomads,—what is the sentimentalist trying to find among these? He floods them with the light of his own vacant mind, and calls that light their souls!’ So the speaker passes on—to the heights of the Alps, perhaps, where he finds communion; God communicating with all men somewhere. A more elaborate person pauses next before the Mystic. ‘The man is in error,’ is his criticism; ‘he would fain prove himself an artist, but art deals only with things beautiful,—with remote forms of nature, with the dreamy past, with antique turns of thought, with what is essentially exquisite in itself—and it has, moreover, a terminology quite at variance with ordinary speech. Man yearns to the unknown and illimitable, and demands distance in the subjects of his art.’ And this other goes his way, grateful to God for Greece and Italy, and for Lessing and Winkelmann. Meantime the poor criticised Barbarian has not budged. He looks on into the eyes nearest to him, and ah! what distance does he not find there? Approaching each creature as ever from the mystic side, he becomes, in spite of himself, an optimist. The moment he seizes for examination is the divine moment, when the creature under examination—be it Buonaparte or a street-walker, Bismarck or ‘Barbara Gray’—is at its highest and best, whether that ‘best’ be intellectual beatification or the simple vicarious instinct which merges in the identity of another. He sees the nature spiritualised, in the dim strange light of whatever soul the creature possesses. This light is often very dim indeed, very doubtful—so doubtful that its very existence is denied by non-mystic men whose musings assume the purely spiritual and unimaginative form. But be the teaching true or false, be the light born in the subject examined or in the human sentiment that broods over it, this mystic approach to the creature at his highest point of spiritualisation, this mode of approach which seems unnatural to many because it involves the most minute enumeration of details and the most careful display of the very facts of 317 life which artists try most to conceal, is the only procedure possible to the present writer. The personal key-note to all his work—poor enough, God knows, is all that work from his own point of view—is to be found in the ‘Book of Orm,’ 1 and most of all in the poem entitled ‘The Man Accurst.’
Imagination is not, as some seem to imply, the power of conjuring up the remote and unknowable, but the gift of realising correctly in correct images the truths of things as they are and ever have been. He who can see no poetry in his own time is a very unimaginative person. The truly imaginative being is he who carries his own artistic distance with him, and sees the mighty myths of life vivid yet afar off, glorified by the truth which is Eternal. How many people can walk out on a starry night, or sit by the side of the sea, unmoved? But let a comet appear, or a star shoot, and they exclaim, ‘How beautiful!’ Let a whale rise up in the water and roar, and they think, ‘How wonderful are the works of God!’ These are the people, and their name is legion, who lack as yet the consecrating gleam of the imagination. As for the Mystic, he needs neither a comet nor a whale to fill his soul with a sense of the wonderful; he needs still less the dark vistas of tradition or the archaic scenery of obscure periods. He comes into the world, as has been said, like a man dropped from the moon, and he walks all his life as among wonderful beings in a strange clime. How far has he not wandered, how far has he not yet to wander?—and every face he sees is turned in the same direction. Faces! how they haunt them with their weird beauty and divine significance! Go where he may, his path swarms with poetic forms. All is glorified and awful. What is nearest seems of all the most sublime and unaccountable. It is with difficulty that he can bear any book or contemplate any painted picture, seeing what books and pictures present themselves in the strangely-coloured lives of his fellow-beings. He turns to history—not in disdain of what exists, but in search of explanation and corroboration, and in order to discover what part of the strange show there is perishable, what part
1 The Author trusts that future readers will not be misled by the Celtic framework of this poem, which is as modern as any of the rest, and might be entitled, representing as it does the spiritual and non-dramatic side of the Author’s nature, the ‘Book of Robert Buchanan.’ Intellectually, it is the key to all his writings.
318 durable and eternal. Having as he thinks discovered that, he may become a poet, and put on record his own idea or autobiography, written in reference to his own time, but to be used in all after-times as explanatory and corroborative. Homer, the Greek tragedians, Aristophanes, Plato, David and the prophets, the authors of the Sagas and Lieds, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, William Langdale, Chaucer, the ballad-singers of Scotland and England, Ben Jonson, Shakspere, La Fontaine, Burns, Wordsworth, Jean Paul, Balsac, Shelley, Whitman,—do we find any of these men, poets all of them, turning away from his own time because it is too uninteresting? or, on the contrary, do we find them penetrating to the very soul of it, stirring to every breath of it, uttering every dream and aspiration of it? Does Dante try to write like Virgil, though he sits at Virgil’s feet? Does Chaucer ape Boccaccio, though he wears the Decameron next his heart? Does Ben Jonson reproduce Plautus or La Fontaine Rabelais? Does Burns, having drunk Scotch ballads into his soul, sing as the ballad-writers sang? Do we find Wordsworth seeking for subjects far back in the dark ages? Has Shelley so little imagination as to reproduce Greek tragedy as it was, or so much imagination as to make of his ‘Prometheus’ a veritable modern poem [in spite of the falsehood and shallowness of the myth it preserves] with a distinctly modern purpose and scope?
‘But,’ some one again interposes, ‘this is such an unpoetic age, and the surroundings of modern life are so vulgar.’ The writer understands this objection, and there is reason in it. The majority of people find their ordinary associations vulgar and unpoetic, and like to be lured away from them and interested. So much the worse, alas! for the majority. But let it be at once admitted that the poet fails altogether if he fails to lure readers and interest them as they desire. He is no mere moral teacher, but a singer of the Beautiful, and his real business in this world is not to join in a Chorus raised by any group of people, but to explain some point of beauty which has rested altogether hidden until his advent. If people are unimaginative, he comes to teach them imagination: if people dislike modern subjects, he comes to make them like modern subjects. If ordinary people perceived the sublime mysteries of contemporary life, if ordinary people understood the faces and souls they behold daily, it would be a waste of time to sing to them. 319 Whether from too elaborate a collegiate education, or from class pride, or from actual deficiency of imagination, they do really associate vulgarity with a certain class of subjects, they do really feel that contemporary life is not naturally poetic, they do really breathe more freely under the masks of the old drama, than when face to face with the terrific commonplaces and sublime vulgarities of great cities. Views of contemporary life, to please them, must be greatly idealised or subdued to the repose of Greek sculpture; but, for the most part, they would consign contemporary material to the comic writer, and reserve our ordinary daily surroundings for the use of the manufacturers of Adelphi farces. In ‘Pindar and Poets unrivalled,’ they confine their sympathy to tradition, and care most for statuesque woes and nude intellectualities moving on a background of antique landscape. If they are to find a poetic theme on the soil, they must go very far back in the chronicle—say, as far as Boadicea, The more misty the figures, the less their vulgarity, in the eyes of those who wish to build colleges on Parnassus, and who learn Greek in order to address the Muses, forgetting that the nine ladies now favour the moderns, and have almost entirely forgotten their beautiful native tongue.
However, the mania for false refinement, which distinguishes educated vulgarity, must not blind us to the truth that a large portion of the public, and these highly intellectual people, are quite incapable of perceiving the poetry existing close to their own thresholds. The little world in which they move is so vulgar and sordid, or so artificial, that the further they escape from its suggestions they feel the freer. What they cannot feel in the office or the drawing room they try to feel in the garden of Academus. Their daily life, their daily knowledge and duty, is not earnest enough to supply their spiritual needs, and they very naturally conclude that the experience of their neighbours is as mean as theirs. In the ranks of such men we not seldom find the lost Student; but the majority call themselves cultured, as their neighbours call themselves virtuous,—just for want of some other spicier peculiarity to distinguish them from their fellows!
Let it be at once conceded that our modern life is complex and irritating, and, at a superficial glance, sadly deficient in picturesqueness. Streets are not beautiful, and this is the age of streets; trade 320 seems selfish and common, and this is the age of trade; railways, educational establishments, poor houses, debating societies, are not romantic, and this is the age of all these. But if we strip off the hard outer crust of these things, if we pass from the unpicturesqueness of externals to the currents which flow beneath, who then shall say that this life is barren of poetry? Never, I think, did such strange lights and shades glimmer on the soul’s depths, never was suffering more heroic, or courage more sublime, never was the reticence of deep emotion woven in so closely with the mystery and the wonder of the world. Yet a very brief glance at recent poetry will show how blind our poets have been to this most legitimate material. With the exception of Browning, Victor Hugo, Clough, and Whitman, few modern poets reach the deeper significance of their century. Tennyson is supreme, but he belongs to the last generation. Perhaps ‘Aurora Leigh’ contains passages newer, truer, and profounder than any other modem poem. England has lost a great modern light in Mrs. Browning. She has left little behind her to represent her mighty sympathy and capacity for apprehending, but she stands unique in these days—specifically a poet—one troubled by the great mystery of life, and finding no speech adequate but song. Had she survived, and been open to English influences, she would have written her name on the forehead of her time, and forced the stream of English poetry into a newer and a deeper channel.
But it is at least clear, from this example, that the poetry of humanity is newly dawning. To the preacher, to the poet, to the philosopher, the people must look more constantly than heretofore for guidance. Religion and science have their spheres defined for them: our singers are but learning to define theirs. Genius, as much as liberty, is the nation’s birthright, and it misses its aim when it confines its ministrations to any section of the state. Poetic art has been tacitly regarded, like music and painting, as an accomplishment for the refined, and it has suffered immeasurably as an art, from its ridiculous fetters. It has dealt with life in a fragmentary form, and with the least earnest and least picturesque phases of life. Yet the intensity of being (for example) among those who daily face peril, who are never beyond want, who have constant presentiments of danger, who wallow in sin and trouble, ought to bring to the 321 poet, as to the painter, as lofty an inspiration as may be gained from those living in comfort, who make lamentation a luxury and invent futilities to mourn over. The world is full of these voices, and the poet has to set them into perfect speech. But this truth has been little understood, and but partially acted upon. Our earliest English poets had some leanings towards the heroism of fate-stricken men; and William Langdale could dwell on the love of a hind with the same affection as Spenser bestowed upon the devotion of a knight. The old poet had a wholesome regard for merit unbiassed by accessories; but the broad light he wrote in has suffered a long eclipse.
The risk of appearing self-credulous shall not prevent me from explicitly expressing, in the interests of art and artists, the principles which have regulated my own tentative attempts at this poetry of humanity. They may be briefly enumerated. That the whole significance and harmony of life is never to be lost sight of in depicting any fragmentary form of life, and that, therefore, the poet should free himself entirely from all arbitrary systems of ethics and codes of opinion, aiming, in a word, at that thorough disinterestedness which is our only means to the true perception of God’s creatures. That every fragmentary form of life is not fit for song, but that every form is so fit which can be spiritualised without the introduction of false elements to the final literary form of harmonious numbers. That, failing the heroic stature and the noble features, almost every human figure becomes idealised whenever we take into consideration the background of life, or picture, or sentiment on which it moves; and that it is to this background a poet must often look for the means of casting over his picture the refluent colours of poetic harmony. That the true clue to poetic success in this kind is the intensity of the poet’s own insight, whereby a dramatic situation, however undignified, however vulgar to the unimaginative, is made to intersect through the medium of lyrical emotion with the entire Mystery of human life, and thus to appeal with more or less force to every heart that has felt the world.
In such individual utterance there is clearly a danger of one-sidedness, of crediting the world with the poet’s own emotion, the more so as that emotion must interpenetrate more or less consciously with the actual emotion of the speaker, so as to result in a conscientious and moving picture, with a faint though audible tone of lyric 322 harmony. The reader must not only see the truth, but see it through the novel medium of a poetic individuality. It may be a truth old as the hills, hoary with the snows of century after century, but it is only a poetic truth so far as the new mental light irradiates and transfigures it. If the world sees such figures as Liz, Nell, Poet Andrew, Meg Blane, through the troubled atmosphere of the writer’s soul, let not the world complain that it sees them no longer under the dark loveless shadow in which they were previously perceived, if perceived at all. One cannot so clear that atmosphere as to bring it to the ambient purity and perfect veracity of God’s own air. The poet, be he great dramatist, like Sophocles, or morbid dreamer, like Blake, cannot free himself wholly from the disturbing forces of his own heart. He has but one clue to the mystery, and that is his own individuality. ‘It is astonishing,’ says a loose but occasionally felicitous writer, ‘how large a harvest of new truths would be reaped simply through the accident of a man’s feeling, or being made to feel more deeply than other men. He sees the same objects, neither more nor fewer, but he sees them engraved in lines far stronger, and more determinate, and the difference in the strength makes the whole difference between consciousness and sub-consciousness. And in questions of the mere understanding, we see the same fact illustrated. The author who wins notice the most, is not he that perplexes men by truths drawn from fountains of absolute novelty—truths as yet unsunned—and from that cause obscure; but he that awakens into illuminated consciousness ancient lineaments of truth long slumbering in the mind, although too faint to have extorted attention.’ 1 And here is an explanation why, through all truly good and sane poetic art, runs that strange personal light which fascinates as music or style, and is the invariable characteristic of the true singer.
I must not be understood as insisting that humble contemporary life is the only legitimate material of the modern poet. Strongly as I am convinced that the mighty reserve force, the ardent strength and sanity of this people, lies little acknowledged in the ranks of that class which is only just emerging into political power, firmly as
1 De Quincey on Wordsworth’s Poetry, p. 260.
323 I would indicate how exotic teachers have emasculated the youth and the flower of our schools and universities, I would yet be just to all contemporary life, social, political, moral. ‘Religion,’ says Goethe, ‘stands in the same relation to art as any other of the higher interests of life. It is a subject, and its rights are those of all other subjects.’ Yet how scantily are morality and religion represented in modern art. Why, for instance, is our Christianity forgotten as a subject? Where is the great poem, where the noble music built on that wondrous theme? Milton, with all his power, is academic, not modern; and, with the exception of a few utterances of Wordsworth and Clough, all our other religious poetry is conventional and inartistic.
We hear, indeed, the metallic periods of the didactic teacher, and the feeble wail of the religious enthusiast, but seldom indeed are our nobler intellectual and spiritual strivings phrased into perfect song. The reticence of false culture steals over the lips of many who might instruct us deeply by their experience, who, if they do speak, are moved by the retrograde spirit of another civilisation, and use the formal periods of an alien tongue. Why, in the name of our new gods, are we still to be bound by the fetters of Prometheus? We are, if not quite Celts, more Celts than Greeks, and, thank heaven, not altogether an intellectual nation. We have nothing in common with the Athenian civilisation. In the same spirit that we demolished its monuments to transport them piecemeal to our museums, we mutilate its language to carry it into our schools. In our clumsy attempts to imitate ancient art and literature, we seek in vain to hide the gait of the barbarian. Even our strongest natures fail at this task.
There is reason to apprehend that this traditional intellectuality is melting away, and that clearer and nobler forces are beginning to operate upon our young minds. We are a modern people, slightly barbaric in matters of art; but our natures have a glow of emotion quite unknown to the spirit of Athenian inquiry. There is a great emotional and spiritual life yet unrepresented, there are rude forces not yet brought into play, but all of which must sooner or later have their place in art; and the indigenous product of our experience, however inferior to other civilisations, is yet vastly superior 324 to all exotics grafted on the weathered trunk of what was once a noble tree. 1
1 In answer to thoughts like this, I have heard it urged that Art is not local but cosmopolitan, and that the artist should aim, as all great artists have aimed, at universality. It is true that the highest art owes its permanence to its universality, but it is also true that the intensity of the local insight, the keenness of the artist’s apprehension of his own time, is the very cause that his work compasses universal truth: since each man’s spiritual experience, if rightly depicted, must correspond, in numberless soul-touching particulars, with the combined experience of the world. There is no catholicity, no universality, no true art, to be got by chill aiming at these things; they are the product of individual natures, acted upon by the great forces of the world and the period. It is nonsense to point to Greek art, especially Greek sculpture, as ‘universal’ in the sense of non-nationality. Nothing can be more Greek, and that is why nothing can be more great.
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