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ON THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO POLITICS

It occasionally happens to men of letters, at political gatherings, to be asked to respond to the toast of Literature; so one may fairly conclude that, in the opinion of many persons, there is between literature and politics a close and familiar relation. I have long believed that there is; and observation of the opinions of others has led me to inquire whether the relation be one of amity or of antagonism. I propose to endeavour, even though it be by reflections that may appear deliberative rather than dogmatic, to elucidate a question that is not devoid of interest.

Mr. Trevelyan has recorded a saying of Macaulay to this effect, that a man who, endowed with equal capacity for achieving distinction in literature and in politics, selects a political career, gives proof of insanity. Most men of letters, I fancy, would endorse that sentiment. But the decisions which men have to make in this world are not, as a rule, presented to them with the definiteness that gives artistic charm, as well as moral meaning, to a well-known masterpiece in the Palazzo Borghese. Between Sacred and Profane Love, between the love of literature and the pursuit of politics, the line is not, in practice, drawn so hard and fast as in the beautiful apologue immortalised by Titian. Loves that are altogether sacred and in no degree profane, are not, I imagine, frequently offered to any one; and though loves wholly profane and in no measure sacred, are, perhaps, not so uncommon, they are not likely in that absolutely coarse form to exercise enduring attraction over the finer spirits. It is the curious and inextricable amalgam of the two that constitutes the embarrassment. Literature entirely divorced from politics is a thing by no means so easily attained, or so disinterestedly sought after, as it is sometimes assumed to be; and though, with much Parliamentary and extra-Parliamentary oratory before our minds, we should hesitate to affirm that politics are not occasionally cultivated with a fine disregard for literature, yet the literary flavour that is still present in the speeches of some Party Politicians, suffices to show that literature and politics are in practice not so much distinct territories as border-lands whose boundaries are not easily defined, but that continually run into, overlap, and are frequently confounded with, each other.

But is it to be desired, even should it appear to be possible, to restrict literature and politics each to its own particular sphere, and forbid either to trespass upon the territory of the other? Would they be gainers by this absolute severance? I am disposed to think that both would be losers; and the loss, I fancy, would fall more heavily upon literature even than upon politics. Dickens is said to have expressed his regret that, as he worded it, a man like Disraeli should have thrown himself away by becoming a politician. The observation, perhaps, smacks a little of the too narrow estimate of life with which that man of genius may not unjustly be reproached. But few people, if any, would think of denying that Lord Beaconsfield might have won more enduring distinction in the Republic of Letters than can be accurately placed to his account, had he dedicated himself with less ardour – or, perhaps it would be more correct to say, with less tenacity – to party politics. Like most persons of a contemplative disposition, he read sparingly, and found in the pages of others not so much what they themselves put there, as a provocation and stimulus to fresh thoughts of his own. “See what my gracious Sovereign sent me as a present at Christmas,” he said to me one day. It was a copy of the edition de luxe of Romola; and in it was written, in the beautiful flowing hand of the Queen, “To the Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G., from his affectionate and grateful friend, Victoria.” “But,” he added, “I cannot read it.” I ventured to recommend him not to make that confession to everybody, for it would not raise their estimate of his literary acumen. “Well,” he said, “it’s no use. I can’t.” No doubt Romola not unoften smells overmuch of the lamp, and in all probability will not permanently occupy the position assigned to it with characteristic over-confidence by contemporaneous enthusiasm. But, if a man can read novels at all, and if he demands from the novelist something more than the mere craft of the story-teller, surely Romola ought to give him pleasure; and I suspect it would have pleased him, had he permitted his taste as a man of letters the same amount of expansion he afforded to his tendencies as a practical politician. At the same time, I could well understand a person arguing, though I could hardly agree with him, that he was not designed by nature to be a more complete and finished man of letters than he actually became, and that his keen interest in politics, and the knowledge of political and social life he in consequence acquired, contribute to his written works their principal charm and their most valuable ingredients. I suspect the truth to be, that he was compounded in such equal proportions of the man of meditation and the man of action, that under no circumstances would he have been content to be merely a man of letters, or merely a politician, and that he fulfilled his nature by being alternately one and the other. That a man should attain to supreme eminence in literature by pursuing such a course, is out of the question. The wonder is that, having achieved even such literary distinction as he did, he should have attained to such supreme eminence as a statesman.

If, therefore, Lord Beaconsfield might have been a more distinguished man of letters, had he not been so keen a politician, the proper conclusion would seem to be that literature in his case suffered hurt, not from politics, but from an excess of politics. It would not be easy to name a character more utterly unlike his than Wordsworth – a man of letters pure and simple, if we are ever to find one. True it is that Wordsworth in extreme youth wrote some political verse, that he loved his country with ardour, and that the word England had for him great and stimulating associations; but, as a rule, he lived remote from human ken, divorced from human business, amid the silence of the starry sky and the sleep of the everlasting hills. What was the result? I admire the best and highest poetry of Wordsworth with a fervour and an enthusiasm not exceeded by those who will, perhaps, forgive me for calling them his more fanatical worshippers. But I must continue to think that Wordsworth would have given himself the chance of being a yet greater poet than he was, had he – I do not say quitted his lakes, and hills, and streams; heaven forbid! – but had he consorted at times more freely and fully with his fellow-men, had he been not a poet only, but something in addition to a poet; had he led a rather more mixed life; had he done, in fact, what we know was done by the great Athenian dramatists, by Virgil, by Dante, by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and even by Shelley. Politics do not necessarily mean party politics, though in this country, at this moment, the one runs dangerously near to implying the other. Politics mean, or ought to mean, the practical concerns of the many, of the state, of the Empire, or of mankind at large, as contradistinguished from the mere personal or class interests. But with those wider concerns Wordsworth would have little or nothing to do, except in the most abstract way; and the consequence is that his poetry is the poetry of the individual, and nearly always of the same individual, and is lacking in the element of variety, especially in the greatest element of all, viz. action, in which is necessarily included the portrayal of passion and character.

Would not the proper conclusion, therefore – a conclusion not overstrained and if not stated with excessive dogmatism – seem to be, that literature, though demanding precedence in the affections, and exacting the chief attention of one who professes really to love it, is not a jealous mistress, but, on the contrary, is only too well pleased to see even its most attached votaries combine with their one supreme passion a number of minor interests and even minor affections. A very sagacious person has said, “Action may not bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.” I am not sure that that is quite true, for Epictetus, and even Epicurus, would have something to say on the other side. But I entertain little doubt that it is strictly true to affirm that the highest literary eminence is not attainable by persons who stand aloof, and have always stood aloof, from the field of action; that mere contemplation, no matter how lofty, how profound, or how persistent, will not make a man a supreme poet or a supreme artist of any kind; and that the doctrine of “art for art’s sake,” if applied in a perverse signification, must end by narrowing and finally debasing what it is intended to elevate. Action helps thought, and thought helps action. By action thought is rendered more masculine, attains to greater breadth, and acquires a certain nobleness and dignity. Thanks to thought, action may become more definite, more precise, more fruitful. But that is on the assumption that each exerts itself in due times and seasons, and leaves to the other abundant opportunities and ample latitude. When we are bidden to observe that

 
the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
 

we well understand that thought has been excessive, that action has not had fair play, and that the brain has paralysed the hand.

No one can read the Iliad without feeling that the writer, or writers, of the stirring debates with which it is thronged had consorted with, and was intimately familiar with public life. Many years ago, addressing an assembling of Cambridge undergraduates at a political meeting, and seeking to justify the toast of literature they had given me as a text, I ventured, with a certain levity congenial to my young but classical audience, to ask if the Iliad is not a political poem, for is it not full of discussions as animated as any of our own Parliamentary ones, in which Agamemnon, Nestor, Ulysses, to say nothing of Thersites, successively take part; and are not these succeeded, as in our own case, by deliberations in an Upper House, where Juno, Venus, Vulcan, and even Jove himself, participate in the oratorical debate? The first and last note of the Æneid, indeed the one text of the great poem of Virgil, is Romanam condere gentem, to show how was established, and to intimate how might be extended, the Empire of Rome. Virgil, the most tender, the most finished, the most literary of poets, took the warmest interest in the politics of his country, or he would never have got much beyond the range of his Pastorals and Bucolics. The first word in the first ode of Horace is the name of an Augustan minister, quickly to be followed by the ode, Jam satis terris, with its patriotic allusions to national pride and military honour. Most people, I imagine, associate Dante with the period of his exile, forgetting why he was exiled. He had to thank the interest he displayed in the politics of his native city for that prolonged banishment; and so keen a politician was this great contemplative bard, that in the same poem in which Beatrice reproves him in heaven, Dante represents his political enemies as gnashing their teeth in hell. That was when he had become the man of letters pure and simple. But, in the hey-day of his fortunes, and long after he had first seen and become enamoured of Beatrice, and had written the Vita Nuova, he had taken so active a part and become so influential a personage in the public affairs of Florence, that, when invited to go on a difficult embassy, he exclaimed, “If I go, who will stay? Yet, if I stay, who will go?” It was no backsliding, therefore, no hesitation, that made Dante a public character for a moment, quickly to repent his infidelity to the Muse. To the last, it is abundantly evident that he would fain have combined in his career the poet and the politician. Yet the first words addressed by Virgil to Dante, when they met nel gran diserto, and Dante asked him whether he was ombra od uomo certo, seem almost to imply that Virgil meant to reprove the intruder upon the selva oscura with condescending to mix in the turmoil of public life, instead of confining himself to literature and philosophy. These are the words, which students of the Divina Commedia will scarcely require to have cited for them:

 
Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto
Figliuol d’Anchise, che venne da Troia,
Poichè il superbo Ilion fu combusto.
Ma tu perchè ritorni a tanta noia?
Perchè non sali il dilettoso monte,
Ch’è principio e cagion di tutta gioia?
 

I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of Anchises, who came from Troy after proud Ilion was laid in ashes. But you – why do you return to worries of that sort! Why do you not ascend the delectable mountain, which is the principle and cause of all true happiness?

We must bear in mind, however, that the words are not the real words of Virgil, but words put into his mouth by Dante at a period when Dante himself was weary and sick to death of tanta noia, the annoyances and mortifications of political life, and had cast longing eyes upon the dilettoso monte. What real man of letters that ever ventured into the arid and somewhat vulgar domain of Party-politics has not felt the same feeling of revulsion, the same longing for the water-brooks? But, years after Dante wrote that passage, he strove, petitioned, and conspired to be allowed to return to Florence and its perpetual civic strife, and envied, as Byron makes him say, in The Prophecy of Dante:

 
… Every dove its nest and wings,
Which waft it where the Apennine look down
On Arno, till it perches, it may be,
Within my all inexorable town.
 

If the Crusades were not politics, we should have to narrow the meaning of the word very considerably; and if the Crusades were political, another Italian poet must be added to the list of those who have not disdained to draw inspiration from public affairs, Torquato Tasso, the author of Gerusalemme Liberata. And what are the first two lines of the Orlando Furioso? —

 
Le donne, i cavallier, l’arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese, io canto.
 

L’audaci imprese! The loves of fair ladies were not enough for Ariosto, but with them he needs must blend the clash of arms and mighty enterprise. Both these poets were, in the phrase of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “unscrupulously epic,” and fused the red-hot lava of their time in the mould of their enduring verse. No one should need to be reminded that Chaucer was the friend of statesmen and the colleague of ambassadors. In him we find the two salient characteristics of all the best English poetry – a close observation and tender love of external nature, and a keen interest in the characters and doings of men; and, for this reason, he has often been hailed as the precursor of Shakespeare. The lofty symbolism of Spenser, and the unvarying elevation and dignity of his style, seem to place him rather remote from the common herd, and to make him, in a sense, a little less human than some might wish him to be. But in his writings he holds himself aloof from the vulgar no more than Dante does; and like Dante, he was a man of the world, and participated in the art of government and the administration of public affairs. The “poet of the poets” combined literature with politics.

The days of Burleigh were hardly days when the son of a provincial wool-stapler was likely to be much heard of in the domain of politics. But the historical plays of Shakespeare traverse a space of more than two hundred years, or from King John to Henry VIII., and could not have been written by one who did not combine with his unmatched poetic gifts a lively interest in the politics of his country. Shakespeare is the idol of us all, the only reproach I have ever heard addressed to him being that he was rather too aristocratic in his sympathies, and too Conservative in the non-Party sense, in his views; foibles which perhaps ought not to surprise us in one who had so intimate a knowledge of human nature, and so shrewd an appreciation of its strong and weak points. Nor was it an injury, but a distinct gain, to the prince of dramatic poets, that he should have been compelled to concern himself with the practical affairs of life, and to busy himself actively with the management of a theatre. The lament about his nature being subdued to what it worked in, may be taken as an ebullition of momentary weakness, even in that robust and manly temperament. Shakespeare was compounded of too many and too large elements to have been a poet only; and “art for art’s sake,” wrongly interpreted, could never have found lodgment in his wide sympathies, his capacious understanding, and his versatile imagination.

If Conservatism may, in a non-party sense, claim Shakespeare as an authority in its favour, in Milton, on the other hand, I suppose Liberalism again in a non-party sense would recognise a support. At any rate, Cromwell’s secretary was a keen politician, and even a passionate partisan. I have always thought the allusion made by Walter Scott to him in his Life of Dryden hasty and unfair. “Waller was awed into silence,” he says, “by the rigour of the puritanic spirit; and even the muse of Milton was scared from him by the clamour of religious and political controversy, and only returned, like a sincere friend, to cheer the adversity of one who had neglected her during his career of worldly importance.” A more recent writer seems to echo the same charge. “In 1641,” he says, “Milton stepped into the lists of controversy as a prose writer, beginning the series of works which, far more than his poetry, gave him his conspicuous public standing during his lifetime, and have doubtless bereaved the world of many an immortal verse which it would otherwise have to treasure.” That Milton’s controversial writings gave him more conspicuous public standing in his lifetime than his poetry is indisputable, and not to be wondered at. A man’s contemporaries would naturally rather have him useful than ornamental, provided he be useful on their side; and while persons whose opinions were furthered by his political writings were, as might have been expected, more interested in these than in poems from which they reaped no advantage, those people, on the other hand, to whom his political writings were obnoxious, felt themselves, as might also have been expected, but little disposed to extol, or even to read, his poetry. It may, perhaps, be taken as an absolute rule that a man of letters who takes a conspicuous interest in contemporary politics thereby debars himself to a considerable extent from literary popularity in his lifetime; a matter of little moment, however, since to every reflective mind contemporary popularity is no pledge of enduring fame, while contemporary neglect is not necessarily an omen of eternal oblivion. But it is quite another thing to affirm that men of letters who, like Milton, participate freely in the political controversies of their time “bereave the world of many an immortal verse,” or to insinuate, with Scott, that they desert the Muse for “a career of worldly importance,” and only remember its charms in the season of their adversity. I think any one who has read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained will be of opinion that Milton wrote quite as much verse as was desirable, whether for our delectation or for his own fame. We see the appalling result of always writing verse and never doing anything else, in the portentous bulk bequeathed to us by even so eminent a poet as Wordsworth, of matter that his idolaters persist in asking the world to accept as a precious revelation, but which the world persists, and I cannot doubt will always persist, in regarding as verse that ought to have gone up the chimney. Matthew Arnold has, in current phrase, “boiled down” Wordsworth, in order to make him more palatable to general consumption; and he gives excellent reasons for having done so.

“In Wordsworth’s seven volumes,” he says, “the pieces of high merit are mingled with a mass of pieces very inferior to them: so inferior to them, that it seems wonderful how the same poet should have produced both. Work altogether inferior, work quite uninspired, flat and dull, is produced by him with evident unconsciousness of its defects, and he presents it to us with the same faith and seriousness as his best work.”

Even in the edition of Wordsworth’s poetry Matthew Arnold has given us, and which contains not a tenth of what Wordsworth published, he has himself exhibited a little too much “faith and seriousness” respecting what he has laboured to save from Lethe, and the “boiling down” process will have to be gone through again by somebody else. The tenth part will have to undergo the operation applied to the whole, and be itself reduced to another one-tenth. The corn must be winnowed by a yet finer sieve; all the chaff and husk must be blown away; and what then remains will be the fine fleur of poetry indeed. In a word, had Wordsworth, like Milton, devoted himself, at some season of his life, to public affairs, he would doubtless have written less verse, and possibly more poetry. Had Milton abstained altogether from politics, he would possibly have written more verse, but it is improbable that he would have written more poetry. What he wrote acquired strength, and even elevation, from his temporary contact with affairs and his judicious co-operation with the active interests of the State. “As the giant Antæus,” says Heine, “remained invincible in strength as long as he touched mother earth with his feet, and lost this power when Hercules lifted him into the air, so also is the poet strong and mighty as long as he does not abandon the firm ground of reality, but forfeits his power when he loses himself in the blue ether.” No doubt the poet must have his head in the air, and no ether need be too high or too rarefied for his imagination to breathe; but without a strong foothold of the ground he runs the risk of too often lapsing, as Matthew Arnold affirms Wordsworth constantly lapsed, into “abstract verbiage,” or of falling into intolerable puerilities.

Nor is it just to assert that Milton neglected the Muse during his career of worldly importance. It would be as fair to say the same of Dante, between whom and Milton, in point of genius as well as in vicissitudes of life, there is a striking similarity. Dante wrote the Vita Nuova at a comparatively early age, just as Milton wrote L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas in the springtime of his life. Then came a pause, indeed a long silence, for each of them, and it was not till they had reached the meridian of intellectual life that they betook themselves each to his magnum opus, Dante to the Divina Commedia, Milton to Paradise Lost. Any one observant of the habit of our best English song-birds must be aware that after singing, with a rapturous lyrical carelessness, through the vernal months, they become silent during the heat of summer. Then in early autumn they sing again, with more measure, more continence, let us say with more self-criticism and fastidiousness; and though the note may not be so boisterous, it is more mellow and mature.

No doubt Dante and Milton did not take this course, of deliberate purpose; with them, too, it was an instinct; but may we not suspect that poets would give themselves a better chance of writing works that posterity will not willingly let die, by observing a “close time,” a season of summer silence between the April of the soul when sing they must, and the advent of the early autumn days, with auburn tints, meditative haze, and grave tranquil retrospects. Who shall say when the fruits of harvest-time begin to ripen? But this clearly one may affirm, that but for the summer months, when they seem almost to be stationary in colour, they would never ripen at all. We know, I think, as a fact, that Milton commenced writing Paradise Lost some years before the restoration of the Monarchy, but no one can tell how much earlier still it was really commenced. Milton himself could not have told. The children of the Muse are conceived long before they quicken; and even a lyric, apparently born in a moment, was often begotten in the darkness and the silence of the days gone by. Works as colossal as the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost have deep and distant foundations, and the noblest passages of human verse are the unpremeditated outpourings of men who are habitually plunged in meditation. The least serious reflection upon the subject, if coupled with any insight into the methods and operations of imaginative genius, will satisfy anybody that in the very midst of his political controversies and ecclesiastical polemics Milton was in reality already composing Paradise Lost. Dante never returned to Florence after he was exiled, and it was in banishment that he wrote the Divina Commedia. Yet the “Sasso di Dante,” the stone on which he used to sit, gazing intently at the Duomo and at Giotto’s Campanile, is one of the sacred sights of the profane Tuscan city, and his townsmen had already learnt to speak of him as “One who had seen Hell.” What enabled him to see it so clearly was his familiarity with the ways of men and the uncelestial politics of Florence. It was through Beatrice and the passion of Love —Amor, che il ciel governi– that he gained access to Paradise, and a knowledge of those things of which he says:

 
… che ridire
Nè sa nè può qual di lassù discende.
 

But the sadness of Purgatory, and the horrors of Hell, these he learned from the wrangles of Guelph and Ghibelline, of these he obtained mastery by being, in A.D. 1300, Priore of the fairest, but most mercurial of cities. We have the authority of Shakespeare, who ought to have been well informed on that subject, that the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact, and the brisk air of public policy is the best corrective for the disease of narrow intensity to which both alike are peculiarly subject.

There would be no difficulty, I think, in showing that all the greater men of letters of the eighteenth century were largely indebted for the literary success they attained to the vivid interest they displayed in public affairs. To mention Dryden, Swift, Pope, Addison is to conjure up before the mind chapter upon chapter of English political history. Pope says:

 
Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory;
 

and not without some reason, for, like his friend Swift, he cared more for his own career than for either Party in the State. But no one can read the valuable notes appended by Mr. Courthorpe to his edition of the great satirist, without seeing how alive Pope was to the quidquid agunt homines of his generation. As for Swift, he was for a time, as the writer of an admirable paper upon him in the Quarterly Review asserts, the political dictator of Ireland. When Gibbon betook himself to the task of writing that monumental work which, I find, many persons to-day declare to be unreadable, but which, I suspect, will be read when the most popular books of this generation are forgotten, he wisely retired to the studious quietude of Lausanne. But he narrates how the description of the tactics of Roman legions and the victories of Roman Proconsuls was rendered more facile and familiar to him by his previous experience as a Captain of Yeomanry at home, while even his brief tenure of a seat in the British Parliament enabled him to grasp with more alacrity and precision the legislative conduct of the Conscript Fathers.

In the nineteenth century which, despite its many privileges – not the least of which, perhaps, was that of being able to express a very high opinion of itself, without at the time being contradicted – enjoyed no immunity from the general laws of human nature, I think the proposition still holds good that men of letters who aspire to high distinction do well not to disdain altogether the politics of their time. I have already referred to Wordsworth, and ventured to suggest that he suffered in some degree, as a poet, from being nothing but a poet. Byron presents a marked contrast in this respect; and I am still of opinion, which I am comforted to find is shared by most persons who are men of the world, and by men of letters who are something more than men of letters, that Byron is, on the whole, the most considerable English poet since Milton. Art for Art’s sake is a creed that has been embraced by too many critics of our time. Do we not find in this circumstance an explanation of their tendency to extol the quietistic and solitary poets, and, on the other hand, to depreciate the poets who deal with action and the more complex features of life? It is the business of poets to deal with the relation of the individual to himself, to the silent uniform forces of nature, and to other individuals, singly and collectively: in other words, to be dramatic or epic, as well as lyrical or idyllic. All poets of the first rank are both; yet the quietistic and purely introspective critics assign a place, and a prior place as a rule, in the front rank, to poets who are only second. I cannot think that conclusions reposing on such demonstrably unsound canons of criticism will permanently hold their ground. Byron contrived to crowd into a very short life a vast amount both of poetry and of public activity; acting upon his own recorded opinion that a man was sent into the world to do something more than to write poetry. A writer who, I fancy, belongs to the school, now happily becoming obsolete, whose verdict was that Byron’s poetry, though good enough for Scott, Shelley, and Goethe, is only “the apotheosis of common-place,” has recently expressed the opinion that “Byron would not have gone to Greece if he had not become tired of the Contessa Guiccioli.” As far as she is concerned, I can only say, as one who knew her, and has many letters written by her on the subject of Byron, that if at any time she ever became indifferent to him, her affection for him experienced a marvellous revival. As for the suggestion that he went to Greece because he was tired of his companion, it surely was not necessary for a man to go to Greece to get rid of a woman of whom he was tired, and certainly Byron was not the man to consider the “world well lost” for a woman. But the letters he wrote to his “companion” from Greece attest that his affection for her was still not slight. In any case there is no necessity to cast about one for any reason to explain Byron’s going to Greece, beyond the exceedingly simple one that he was a man of action as well as a poet. Had he lived, instead of dying, for Greece, I cannot doubt that English poetry would have reaped a yet more glorious harvest from him, thanks to his incidental experiences as a soldier and a statesman.