Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson Part 11

Will any one say that there is the least precision about this picture?

What kind of a place is he describing? How different it is from such verses as are found on every page of Tennyson, as

A full-fed river winding slow By herds upon an endless plain, The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, With shadow-streaks of rain.

Again, when Keble is describing the source of the moorland spring, some of which is beautifully delineated, he says ("Monday in Easter Week"):

Perchance that little brook shall flow The bulwark of some mighty realm, Bear navies to and fro With monarchs at their helm.

Or canst thou guess how far away Some sister nymph, beside her urn Reclining night and day, 'Mid reeds and mountain fern,

Nurses her store, with thine to blend?

This is pure conventionalism: the mixture of the reclining nymph and the mountain fern is not felicitous. Const.i.tutional monarchs do not steer their own ironclads, and it is not picturesque even to pretend that they do.

The following may stand as instances of his failure in precise delineation. In the very first stanza of the book we have:

Hues of the rich unfolding morn, That ere the glorious sun be born,

Around his path are taught to swell.

"Swell" is a property of bulk or sound, surely not of light? Again, addressing the breeze, he says:

Wakenest each little leaf to _sing_.

This is purely conventional; how different from the "laurel's pattering talk" of Tennyson. Again:

The torrent rill That winds unseen beneath the s.h.a.ggy fell, Touched by the blue mist _well_.

How weak a word to end a stanza! Again:

The birds of heaven before us fleet, _They cannot brook our shame to meet_.

How falsetto, how prejudiced a tone! And these are not isolated instances: similar infelicities occur on every page.

Keble's whole view of Nature, it must be said, was onesided and wanting in insight. Nature was to him nothing but a type of mild fervour and uncomplaining patience. "All true, all faultless, all in tune," he says.

To the cruelty, the waste, the ugliness, that seem so inextricably intertwined with natural processes, he diligently closed his eyes. Thus, in No. 9 of the _Lyra Innocentium_ he propagates a host of innocent superst.i.tions as to the power of childhood over wild beasts. It surely is not poetical to say of a baby:

The tiger's whelp encaged with thee Would sheathe his claws to sport and play; Bees have for thee no sting.

because it is not true.

Again, in the beautiful stanzas on the Second Sunday after Trinity, he sees "the many-twinkling smile of ocean" up the glade. His only thought is:

Such signs of love old Ocean gives We cannot choose but think he lives.

An agreeable view, but hardly consistent with the vast and barren cruelties which are as natural to the ocean as his genial presence.

We do not mean that a poet is bound to insist on the harsher aspects of the case, but in a poet like Keble, who made so much of close communion with Nature, of intimate musings, it is mere blindness not to take these things into account. The fault, with Keble, was entirely in man's corrupt heart; further than that he did not care to follow it; he deliberately ignored the bewildering anomaly, the law of failure and suffering that runs through Nature, as surely as through the history of nations. How different a view it was from the view that Tennyson found grow more and more intense with advancing years--that the world was, as it were, the creation of some vast poetic heart, with its necessary concomitant of failure and incompleteness.

Keble himself, in his "Praelectiones Academicae," or lectures delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in his review of the "Life of Sir Walter Scott" (_British Critic_, 1838), enunciated a theory of poetry which it will be well to examine. Dean Church said of the former work, that it was "the most original and memorable course ever delivered from the Chair of Poetry in Oxford"; but the statement does not imply any very extravagant claims. Again, Bishop Moberly said that the book exhibited "a power and delicacy at once so original and so just, as to make these lectures one of the most charming and valuable volumes of cla.s.sical criticism that have ever issued from the press." Allowing for all possible partiality, this is strong praise; but it is difficult to see how it is justified. As to its critical value we may say at once that no one was ever less fitted to be a critic than Keble. "What Keble hated instinctively," says Newman, "was heresy, insubordination, resistance to things established, claims of independence, disloyalty, innovation, a critical and censorious spirit." That is an indifferent outfit for a poet, and an impossible one for a critic. And even granting to Keble a certain submissive ac.u.men, a certain relish for masterpieces, criticism which deals only with the panegyric of great masters, or the cla.s.sification of established reputations is surely the most valueless of all criticism. If it is presented in attractive literary form it merely diverts to itself the attention it professes to direct elsewhere!

If it is elucidatory, it is excusable: but Keble is not elucidatory.

The only true function of criticism is the judicial and tentative selection of contemporary excellence. Artistic impulse, literary progress, poetical production, have orbits of their own. Depreciative criticism is nothing more than a kind of attendant _umbra_, and has never done more than r.e.t.a.r.d, if it has done even that, the popular verdict. Dr. Johnson was perfectly right when he said, "Depend upon it, sir, no man was ever written down but by himself." The criticism of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_, brilliant in form, retrograde in spirit, made a few writers uncomfortable and gave a malicious pleasure to a great number of readers: but poetical creation continued its calm advance quite independently. Nay, they even overshot their mark and called attention to the very writers they professed to crush. Had the reviewers had their way, we should have heard no more of Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Tennyson. The only valuable criticism is the unprejudiced republican criticism, that dares to see what is good and give instant encouragement to it. And Keble's is just the opposite, as might be expected from the whole tone and habit of his mind. A cautious appeal to authority, predetermined canons of taste and propriety--these are his characteristics.

He enunciates the theory which would divide all poets into primary and secondary poets. "Primary poets, according to Keble," says Princ.i.p.al Shairp, "are they who are driven by overmastering enthusiasm, by pa.s.sionate devotion to some range of objects, or line of thought, or aspect of life or Nature, to utter their feelings in song. They sing because they cannot help it.... This is the true poetic a??a of which Plato speaks. Secondary poets are not urged to poetry by any such overflowing sentiment: but learning, admiration, choice and a certain literary turn have made them poetic artists." Of the former kind are Homer, aeschylus, Lucretius, Virgil, Pindar, Shakespeare, Burns, Scott: of the latter, Sophocles, Milton, Dryden, Horace, and Theocritus. This, in itself, is a somewhat singular selection of names. But what absence of insight is there in Keble's judgment that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are the work of one hand, the former in youth, the latter in later life.

"The overmastering feeling of Homer," he says, "is _a sad regret for the decay of the heroic age_, with its common national feeling, its reverence for its leaders." What a fantastic judgment! Homer the poet of a sad regret! Surely it is the very absence of all critical or introspective or even _latent_ thought which gives the poems their overwhelming charm.

The truth is that Keble's theory of poetry is practically an expansion of Aristotle's Poetics, and is a narrow generalisation on wholly insufficient grounds. Poets cannot be swept off the board entire, like chessmen. There are many writers of verse, whose impulse to sing was certainly original, and, according to Keble's definition, primary; yet their work was essentially second-rate. Take such a poet as Southey: he composed in a mood which he mistook for solemn inspiration; his poetry was written in obedience to a high and sacred sense of vocation; he--in a letter which cannot be called conceited, for it is written with a serene and stately consciousness of greatness--placed his own poem of _Madoc_ second only to Milton's _Paradise Lost_. Wordsworth again--writing sometimes from a large and grave inspiration, sometimes from a sense of duty--was he always a primary poet? The fact is that it is almost entirely a matter of expression and style. Many men are poets at heart, and have a vivid and eager consciousness of beauty, but only a small percentage of these have the gift of trans.m.u.ting it into language.

The truth is that secondary poets are mere literary men, _dilettanti_ verse-writers; and all poets who establish a real hold on the minds of others, if it be, as Lovelace, by two lyrics only, or s.h.i.+rley by one, are primary poets. The thing cannot be done at all without a genuine inspiration; but granted the inspiration, even the mood, the expression is not always there.

Keble, says Princ.i.p.al Shairp, was, when tested by his own theory, a primary poet--that is, his impulse and treatment were alike original.

The former of these statements may be granted with certain reservations: _The Christian Year_ is an original book. The idea was an original one and a happy one, though Heber had made a similar attempt. To a.s.sign to each of the seasons of the Church a devotional commentary; to enrich the austere and narrow melody of the ecclesiastical tone--running, like its own plain-song, with a severe and plaintive monotony--with chord upon chord of rich and suggestive philosophy, was no ign.o.ble thought. Indeed, the most apt comparison that can be found for Keble is to consider him as a skilful musician, embroidering and enlarging with intricate harmonies, a series of strict and uniform subjects. It is not, indeed, the highest form of art, but it gives scope for the exercise of a wide and tender skill. But Keble had no really original impulse; he required to have his ground-ba.s.s found for him, and he could construct a descant of admirable softness and delicacy, while underneath moved the solemn and measured music of the ancient tradition.

As to the originality of the form which he employed, it is impossible to agree with Princ.i.p.al Shairp; indeed, he vitiates his whole case by comparing Keble to George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. Was ever a more inapt comparison made? To begin with, Keble was neither a mystic nor even a symbolist. With George Herbert, and even more with Henry Vaughan, the outward sign, the ordinance, the ornaments of religion were weak and faint foreshadowings of some distant glory, some vast truth dimly understood. But to Keble the form, the ceremony, the material detail of service and sacrament were far too real and desirable. An instance of this is to be found in the poem on Holy Baptism.

Where is it mothers learn their love?

In every church a fountain springs, O'er which the Eternal Dove Hovers on softest wings.

What a failure of human perception! It is said that Wordsworth, once reading with admiration the above-mentioned poem, stumbled at the lines I have quoted--the statement that mothers learn their love at the font.

"No, no," said the old poet, "it is from their own maternal hearts."

Henry Vaughan could never have been betrayed into so intimately unreal a statement as this.

Again, as to technical treatment and form, it would be difficult to select two poets so utterly and radically unlike as George Herbert and Keble. The only point of resemblance is that they are both sometimes unnecessarily obscure; but in George Herbert's case this arises from a curious elaboration of expression, an intensity of compression, an omission of logical steps, a tendency to cram a sentence into a word; while in Keble's case, his obscurity arises from a kind of indefinite garrulity, a tendency to divergence on side issues, a vapid displacement of language.

The eye in smiles may wander round, Caught by earth's shadows as they fleet, But for the soul no help is found Save Him who made it, meet.

What could be more inartistic than the disarrangement of the last two lines? No, the strength of Keble lies in the gentle lucidity of many of his finest poems, never in the arresting force of his epithets, never in intricate and ingenious conceits of language.

The real prototypes of Keble in English literature are Gray and Wordsworth. Keble on more than one occasion echoes the stately and majestic cadence of Gray. Could such a stanza as the following have been written without the example of the "Elegy"?

Why should we faint and fear to live alone, Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?

Not even the tenderest heart and next our own Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh.

And again, from the "Second Sunday after Easter":

In outline dim and vast Their fearful shadows cast The giant forms of empires, on their way To ruin: one by one, They tower and they are gone-- Yet in the Prophet's soul the dreams of avarice stay.

He watched till morning's ray On lake and meadow lay, And willow-shaded streams, that silent sweep Around the banner'd lines, Where, by their several signs, The desert-wearied tribes in sight of Canaan sleep.

These sober, grave stanzas have something of the cadence of _The Bard_.

The resemblance to Wordsworth is more general, but it may be said that the tone, the structure, the language of many of Keble's lyrics, the background of Nature in which his thoughts enact their part, the presence of skies and woods and waters, of which he is for ever conscious, for which he is ever grateful, however inaccurately observed and sketched, his innate love of old, traditional, wholesome things, "our peace, our fearful innocence, and pure religion breathing household laws"--all these make Keble a true Wordsworthian.

The qualities of style to which I propose to call attention in Keble are--(1) simplicity; (2) propriety; (3) gravity--all three unpopular qualities enough nowadays, and, therefore, perhaps all the more worthy of study. (1) Simplicity, artistic simplicity, is a n.o.ble thing, and as rare as it is n.o.ble; it must be beyond and above ornateness; anciently, indeed, before literature had begun to knit her infinite combinations, it was more attainable; but now to be unstudied is to be thin. Art must now be "careless with artful care, affecting to be unaffected." Modern simplicity must show the spareness of asceticism, not the leanness of anaemia. It must arise from the repression of luxuriance, not poverty of spirit; strict simplicity implies the rejection of all startling and glittering tricks of style, and consequently it implies a lordly patience in pursuit, with an indefatigable zeal for the selection of the precise, the majestic, the supreme.

I do not say that Keble was always successful in the pursuit of simplicity. But it was his object all through. Outside the _Christian Year_, indeed, in the _Lyra Innocentium_ the studied avoidance of the ornamental and the attractive, degenerated into vapid debility. But in the "Morning" and "Evening" poems:

Only, O Lord, in Thy dear love, Fit us for perfect rest above, And help us, this and every day, To live more nearly as we pray.