GERMAN & FRENCH CRITICISM OF ENGLISH POETS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 12482, 13 October 1902, Page 2

GERMAN & FRENCH CRITICISM OF ENGLISH POETS.

BY T. D. PKARCB\ M.A, At the beginning of the present year Messrs Methuen and Co. published a, translation from the German of a certain Professor Edward EngeFs " History of English Literature (600-1900)." Generally speaking, it is a commendable book, with wellproportioned contents, admirably selected illustrative excerpts, and sound criticism. Professor Engel, of Berlin, adopts 110 halftones, does not mince matters: if lie condemn:?, he condemns to oblivion ; if he praises, he praises to immortality. It is because I disagree with him in his judgments of four English poets occupying conspicuous positions in the history of English poetry that I venture to place his judgments alongside those of eminent French and English critics. I purposely abstain from expressing judgments of my own as unnecessary to the rehabilitation of the poets in question. I have quoted the opinions of Sainte-Beave and Scherer, two indisputably fine foreign critics of our literature. I hope the. contrast I have thus prepared between French and German opinions will be not uninteresting to your readers. " Thomas Grsiv (1716-71) was a very learned man, a linguist, a botanist,-and an historian, but a poet he was not, although he is usually considered one of the regenerators of English poetry. . . The complete edition of his works contains only some 15 poems, in addition to some memorial verses and others. Anyone who lays claim to fame with so small an amount of literary luggage must not carry any light wares; but Gray has not written a single poem of which the mildest criticism can assert that it is rea.l poetry. . . . Even, his best-known poem, 'An Elegy in a Country Churchyard,' cannot be regarded as poetry. It contains a number of somewhat drowsy and very commonplace reflections upon the vanity and instability of all earthly things. In England every educated man knows the churchyard elegy by heart, and considers Gray one of the greatest English poets, since he has been told so as a child ; but this is not enough to hold out the crown to a man who never in his whole life wrote a stanza or even a verse which appeals to the heart. The smart lines most frequently quoted : Where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise, are quite significant; Gray never wrote a foolish word, but also never a poetical one." So speaks Professor Engel of the author of the famous elegy. The celebrated French critic, Sainte-Beuve, reviewing Taine's " English Literature," complains of his fellow-countryman that " he has given too little prominence to the melancholy, refined, original Gray; there is no more likeness between Gray and Lamartine than between a pearl and a lake." Matthew Arnold, in the final paragraph of his critical essay on Gray, says: " Gray said himself tliat ' the style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, musical.' Compared, not with the work of the great masters of the golden ages of poetry, but with the poetry of his own contemporaries in general, Gray's may be said to have reached, in style, the excellence at which he aimed; while the evolution also of such a piece as his ' Progress of Poesy' must be accounted not less noble, and sound than its style." That is the verdict of a poet and a critic. Here is Tennyson's opinion of Gray: " Gray in his limited sphere is great, and has a wonderful ear. I consider the following among the most liquid lines in any language: Though lie inherit Nor the pride, nor ample pinion That tli© Theban eagle bear, Sailing with supreme dominion Through the azure deep of air. and also, 'And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.'" Professor Bain can say.: " His scanty collection of poems is one of the treasures of our language." As a counterblast to the German's attack on the 1 Elegy,' let us place Professor Hales's opinion: " But, while it is to be lamented that Gray did not do more for his own day and for posterity, let us be grateful for what he did do. That life was not lived in vain that gave us the ' Elegy.'" And, finally, Mr Edmund Gosse: "By credit of this single piece Gray stands easily at the head of all the English elegaic poets, and as Mr Swinburne puts it, ' holds for all ages to come his unassailable and sovereign station." Encrusted as it is with layers upon layers of eulogy, bibliography, and criticism, we have but to scrape these away to find the immortal poem beneath, as fresh, as melodious, as inspiring as ever." WOKBSWORTTI. Professor Engel devotes three pages, mostly of damaging criticism, to Wordsworth. He institutes a contrast between the poems "To a daisy," by Wordsworth and by Burns preferring tlie latter's. In that preference I agree with him. But when in the next sentence he contrasts Shelley with Wordsworth in -the matter ef their odes " To a Skylark," to the disparagement of Wordsworth, I disagree with him, maintaining that the professor's own criticism of Wordsworth's "To a Daisy"— viz., "that it does not bring us any nearer to the flower or the poet"—is exactly applicable to Shelley's ode. " Wordsworth would have been quite forgotten both by foreigners and poetry-loving Englishmen but for a few short poems which keep his name in friendly remembrance. " In the next short poem we see both the good and the bad side of Wordsworth : — My heart leaps tip when I behold A rainbow in the sky; So it was when my life began, So is it now I am a- man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The child' is father of the man; And I ccmld wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. This is certainly very nice poetry for a child's reading-book ; but can one imagine anything in worse taste than thus moralising on a purely human feeling?" So the German professor. I feel inclined to answer his question in the affirmative, giving as an answer: "\es, the bad taste or absence of taste preventing anyone, Englishman or foreigner, from appreciating such a delicious lyric." "In England the 'Ode to Immortality is still considered to be one of Wordsworth's enduring masterpieces. This ode is poor in thought, and its language is weak. Isolated lines do not suffice to make it a work of art." Let us put alongside this Professor Saintsburv's criticism : " The ode remains not merely the greatest, but the one really, dazzlingly, supremely great thing he ever did. its theory has been scorned or impugned by some; parts of it have even been called' nonsense by critics of weight, sound or unsound, sense or nonsense, it is poetry, and magnificent poetry, from the first line to the last— poetry than which there is none better in any language, poetry such as, perhaps, there is not a small volume-full in all languages." While I can never admire Professor Saintsbury's style of criticism, I do not in this case agree with him in placing the ode as the high-water mark of Wordsworth's work. Rather I agree with Mr Hamilton Ma-hie, an American critic, in placing the "Tintevn Abbey" lines above all other work by Wordsworth. Mons. Scherer says: "This piece, noble, magnificent as it is, has always seemed to me to ring a little false." Grant that the thought is poor, what does the profes.%>r mean by saying its language is weak? If by "weak" he means "simple," I admit the contention ; but simplicity of diction is one of the essential characteristics of true poetry. Besides, has the professor no admiration for the structure of the ode, or for the musicalness of the piece? As a final slap at Wordsworth, the professor says: " If Wordsworth and his colleagues really introduced anything new, it seems to be due to the fact that since their days English aastheticism has regarded superficial religious feeling, serious twaddle, and certain weak and simple sketches from

Nature as the very height of poetry. The proneness of a large number of English critics to laud Wordsworth to the skies at the expense of all the other poets of the nineteenth century arises from this hidden feeling on the critic's part: 'If this be true poetry, we, too, may be numbered among the poets at last!' " Within those words is contained the professor's sole reference to Wordsworth as the high priest of Nature. The famous lines on the Wye, so much admired by Tennyson, are not even mentioned. The German seems here to be in agreement with the Frenchman Taine, wi,o found Wordsworth "limitless boredom." Not so, however, with his fellow countryman and contemporary, Edmond Scherer,, who says -. " Let' us leave these imperfeotions and faults alone, and seek nothing in Words-| worth but- \vhat. in some, he is—one of the poets who have best loved, felt, and rendered Nature." Later on he speaks "of the admirable verses composed on the banks of the Wye, All the poet is in this piece, where depth of sentiment has found perfect expression, and which is almost sufficient when translated to give a knowledge of Wordsworth and of his genius." Professor Engel does not make any mention of Wordsworth's sonnets, other than his "religious sonnets." I think this somewhat remarkable, as elsewhere in his " History " he appreciates the sonnet form and English exercises in , it. Speaking of that genius, so much akin to Wordsworth, he says: "Milton's sonnets, few in number as they are, must be reckoned among tlife most valuable English poems of this class. The vigour of language, the sounding rhythm, the conciseness of expression have scarcely ever been equalled or surpassed by English sonnetists. They contain some of the most beautiful specimens of poetical eloquence in English literature." If he can thus speak of Milton, how comes it he passes by such sonnets "as " On Westminster Bridge." "Milton," and "The World is Too Much With Us"? Of Wordsworth's work in the sonnet-form both Edmond Scherer and Sainte-Beuve spoke in the warmest terms of admiration. Scherer says: " Wordsworth's predilection for the sonnet, and the success wherewith' he has cultivated ai kind which might seem artificial for a poet of Nature and of the fields, are things to be observed, and important to take account of in the final estimate. He has really excelled in it, and many of his sonnets approach perfection. Although English literature is singularly rich in poetical jewels of this kind, Wordsworth, to my taste, has in this respect rivals, but no superiors." Finally, in contract to Professor Engel's poor opinion of Wordsworth's title to a foremost place in literature, let us place the opinions of Tennyson and Scherer. We are told by Halla-in, Lord Tennyson, that his father often expressed "a hearty admiration for Wordsworth, the purity arid nobility of whose teaching he highly reverenced. 'He seems to me,' my father would say, ' at his best on the whole the greatest English poet since Milton.'" So thought Scherer, the French critic. His concluding words to his admirable essay on "Wordsworth and Modern Poetry "are: "If Shakespeare, as I hold, remains absolutely and for ever peerless, Wordsworth seems to me to come after Milton ; deci- ' redly, I think, below him, but still first after him. He is of the .stuff whereof the immortals are made." MATTHEW ARNOLD. Matthew Arnold, the poet, the critic, and the philosopher, who exerted and still exerts a profound influence among cultured minds, Professor Engel dismisses within three lines. " Matthew Arnold (1822-88), a poefc below mediocrity, a nar-row-minded critic, who is one of the most enthusiastic of Wordsworth's recent adherents." "A poet below mediocrity"! Let us hear the Frenchman's verdict. Edmond Scherer says: " Mr M. Arnold occupies a high place-in the contemporary literature of his country. He presents a singular example of that modern curiosity which explores all paths, touches .all subjects, and tries all ways of expression. . He has been by turns a theologian, a poet, and a critic, and (a rarer thing) he has attempted nothing in which he has not excelled. . . . I may add that in Mr Arnold the poefc has .the • same elasticity as the thinker; he takes all manners and learves them by turns; by turns he tries all instruments. We have from him epic stories and attempts in drama, elegies of no common savour, great philosophical pieces. And in every style he has a certain absolutely personal accent and note of distinction. The language of verse has seldom clothed thought at once so ample and so easy." Or take Mr Saintsbury's verdict, and in this connection it is well to bear in mind that the name of M. Arnold is to Mr Saintsbury as a red rag to at bull; he cannot mention Arnold anywhere in any manner without carping at him. Well, Mr Saintsbury's final verdict is: "His best poetry where it appears is of surpassing charmuniting in a- way, of which Andrew Marvell is perhaps the best other example in English lyric, romantic grace, feeling, and music to a classical and austere precision of style, combining nobility of thought with grace of expression, and presenting the most characteristically modern ideas of his own particular day with an almost perfect freedom from the jargon of that day, and in a key always suggesting the great masters, the great thinkers, the great poets of the past." . " A narrow-minded critic ! SainteBeuve speaks of Arnold as one of the keenest and most exact of English critics." Scherer: "From the marriage of such a thinker and such a poet sprang a- critic— the liveliest, the most delicate, the most elegant of critics, the critic who has given out most ideas, has conferred upon them the most piquant expression, and has most thoroughly shocked the sluggishness of British thought by wholesome audacities.' Elizabeth Lee, one of the most recent of literary critics, says of Arnold that "he is the only English critic who may worthily be placed by Sainte-Beuve's side." And -Mr Saintsbury, with many misgivings, says: " Nothing better {if the land (individual crotchets always excepted) has ever been written than his introductions to selected lines from Johnson's Poets, to Byron, to Shcllev (the most crotchety and unsound of all), to Wordsworth (incomparably the best). He aided others ; and a collection of his purely or mainly literary work is still eagerly expected. Even this would be extremely unequal and open to exception here and there. But it would contain some of the very best things to be found in any English critic. Anil this, after all, if not the absolutely highest, is one of the highest things that can be said of a critic, and one of the rarest." ALFRED TENNYSON. " The question which must be asked concerning every poet who is accounted ' great' by his countrymen is this: What has he told the world, or only his own country, that is new? And in Tennyson's case it may be answered much as follows: ' He ■has helped to create modern English romance and has given new forms to lyric poetry.' By the romance of Tennyson and his. successor, we understand a kind of revival of the tradition of King Arthur. . . . Modern English romance was only 'affected,' as little 'felt' as the dallying with the classical mythology of the eighteenth century, or the revelling in Oriental wealth of colour at the beginning of the nineteenth. Not a line of Tennyson's numerous poems on Arthur will survive." This coincides with Table's crit-icisni of Tennyson's work as "amiable dilettantism." As I cannot quote a Frenchman against this German's dictum that not a line of Tennyson's 10,000 lines on the Arthurian legend will survive, in default I quote the two leading living critics who uttered pronouncements on Tennyson's merits after his death. Professor Saintsbury : " No total so brilliant, so varied within a certain general utility, so perfectly polished in style, so cunningly adjusted to meet the popular without disappointing the critical ear, had ever come from Tennyson's pen as the first quartet of the Idylls, Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere. No such boftk of English blank verse, with the doubtful exception of the 'Seasons,' had been seen since Milton." Speaking of the value of the " Idylls of the King," the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke says: " No one, a hundred years hence, will care, a straw about the allegory ; but men will always care about the story, and how the poefc has made the persons in it set forth their human nature on the stage of life." The second point is a matter of the poetic art. After appraising Tennyson as the master of short, concise pieces, Professor Engel continues : " Unfortunately, he was also the inventor and most influential writer of immoderately long pieces of rhythmical prose without any pretence to art. Since Tennyson, English poetry has suffered from a wild profusion of endless

verbiage, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne are the poets who can never make an end." "Immoderately long pieces of rhythmical prose without any pretence to arfc" can only be the German's description of Tennyson's blank verse. Now, such a criticism comes as a surprise, especially from one who lias already admired the blank verse of Shakespeare anjl of Milton. If Herr Engel can appreciate " the great musical art of Milton's versification," how comes it that Tennyson's versification is inartistic? What do others say? Air Saintsbury: "In all other respects his versification is by far the most perfect of any English poet, and results in a harmony positively incomparable; . . . Take any one of a myriad lines of Tenr;'son, and the mere arrangement of vowels and consonants will be a delight to the ear." And Mr Stopford Brooke is equally certain of the excellence of Tennyson's blank verse. "Moreover, within -the realm of arfc much might be said of the technic of the verse. . . . Through this long scries of poems the blank verse is of almost equal excellence throughout. It is, as a vehicle of thought and emotion, entirely at the poet's command. He can make it do exactly what he likes. . . . There arc also none of the changes, tricks, and placing of caesura or accent which all the artists of the past in blank verse, and especially Milton, have used, with which Tennyson is not acquainted, and which ho does not himself use with as much science as art. Yet the result is all his own. His blank verse stands apart, original, growing out of his temper and character. . . . At its best it is extraordinarily noble, rolling like a full-fed river through the country of the imagination." "' In Memoriam ' contains much that is wise and good. Its purely poetic merit is small, and it is easy to understand that a dirge in a hundred and twenty-nine stanzas car not fail to weary us in the long run." Now, " its purely poetic merit " is the theme of Mr Saintsbury's praise. I refrain from quoting in extenso; "There is scarcely a, bad line in 'In Memoriam.' . . . There is nothing greater about it than the way in which, side by side with the prevailing undertone of the stanza, the individual precis vary the music and accompany it, so. to speak, in duet with a particular melody. It must have been already obvious to good ears that no greater master of English harmonies—perhaps that none so great—had ever lived; but 'In Memoriam' set the fact finally and irrevocably on record." Professor Engel's final verdict on Tennyson is: "At his funeral there was a, general feeling that in him the greatest English poet of the second half of the nineteenth century had departed this life. Of his numerous volumes it is probable very little will survive, perhaps only one or two of the shorter "poems; bub his memory will long outlast his works among the English people, as that of at noble man, and a poet of great refinement." The memory of this noble man will ceitainly long survive, helped by the beautiful memoir from his son's ,pen; but I decline to receive the prophecy of Professor Engel that his memory will survive his works. Once more, what do others say, by way of contrast? To quote the Frenclrman first, who was writing so far back as 1875: There came a new poet who, to the scietics of rhythm, the resources of expression, tho gift of epic narration, the deep feeling for;. Nature, to all the caprices of a delightful fancy, to all the favourite ideas, noble or morbid, of modern thought, knew how ta join the language of manly passion. Thus, as it were summing up in himself all his forerunuers, he touched all hearts; he linked together all admirations; he has remained the true representative, the last expression and final, of the poetic period to tvhich he belongs. Tennyson reigns to-day almost alone in increasing and un - contested glory."—Scherer. Professor Saintsbury: "We have, it must be admitted, had greater poets than Tennyson. Shakespeare, Spencer. Milton, Shelley, undoubtedly deserve this preference to him; Wordsworth and Keats may deserve it. But we have none so uniformly, and .over such a large mass of work, exquisite." And Mr Stopford Brooke, at the conclusion of his monograph on Tennyson, says prophetically: "Forty years of creation were given to make this new country of the imagination, which men will visit, and in which t'hey will wander with pleasure, 'while humanity endures. Everyone who m the centuries to come shall spend therein his leisure will leave it and return to his daily work, consoled and cheered, more .wise ■and more loving, less weary and heavyladen, nearer to beanty and righteousness, more inspired and more exalted. The permanence of the work of Tennyson i* secure. Few are his failures, many are his successes."