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No comparison of Dante with Milton would be complete that omitted consideration of the respective themes of their chief works, their two great epic poems, the Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost. I am disposed to think, though others may think differently, that Dante has in this respect a signal advantage over Milton. If any one is curious to see how a man of great parts, but in some respects of rather insular views, can fail to understand the theme of the Divina Commedia, and Dante’s treatment of it, he has only to turn, as Mr. Courthope did in his address to the British Academy, to Macaulay’s essay on Milton, where Dante is written of as though he were nothing but a great Realist. Many years ago I suggested as a definition of poetry, and have more than once urged the suggestion, that it is “the harmonious transfiguration of the Real into the Ideal by the aid of elevating imagination,” so that, when the poet has performed that operation, his readers accept the ideal representation as real, that surest test of the greatness of a poet, provided his theme itself be great. The Divina Commedia stands that test triumphantly; and the result is that Dante makes credible, even to non-believers while they read the poem, the central conception and beliefs of medieval Christianity, which are still those of Roman Catholic Christianity. Hence they remain real facts for the transfiguring idealism of poets to deal with.

Can the same be said of Paradise Lost? What is “real” does not depend on the arbitrary choice of any one, but on the communis sensus, the general assent of those to whom the treatment of the assumed “real” is addressed. Is that any longer so in the case of Paradise Lost? Are the personality of the devil, the insurrection of Lucifer and the rebel angels, and their condemnation to eternal punishment, with power to tempt mortals to do that which will lead to their sharing that punishment, now believed in by any large number of Christian Englishmen or English-speaking Christians, or is it ever likely again to be so believed in? I must leave the question to be answered by every one for himself. But on the answer to it, it is obvious, the realistic basis of Paradise Lost depends. If the reply be negative, then what remains is the magnificence of the imagery and the sonority of the diction. To extol the one over the other in these respects would indeed be invidious. It is enough to place them side by side to manifest their equality. If Milton writes:

 
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms;
 

Dante writes:

 
Diverse lingue, orribili favelle,
Parole di dolore, accenti d’ira,
Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle,
Facevan un tumulto, il qual s’aggira
Sempre in quell’ aria senza tempo tinta,
Come l’arena quando il turbo spira.
 

Withal, it would show imperfect impartiality if one failed to allow that there is more variety in the Divina Commedia than in Paradise Lost. Milton never halts in his majestic journey to soothe us with such an episode as that of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, or closes it with so celestial a strain as that describing the interview of Dante with Beatrice in Heaven.

No third poet in any nation or tongue could be named that equals Dante and Milton in erudition, or in the use they made of it in their poetry. The present writer is himself too lacking in erudition to presume to expatiate on that theme. Others have done it admirably, and with due competency. But on this ground, common to them both, I reluctantly part with them. To each alike may be assigned the words of Ovid, Os sublime dedit, and equally it may be said of both, that, in the splendid phrase of Lucretius, they passed beyond the flammantia mœnia mundi. Finally, each could truly say of himself, in the words of Dante,

 
Minerva spira e conducemi Apollo.
 

“The Goddess of Wisdom inspires me, and the God of Song is my conductor and my guide.”

BYRON AND WORDSWORTH

The present age can hardly be reproached either with an absence of admirers or with a lack of self-complacency. Even its most fervid flatterers, however, ever and anon admit that it exhibits a few trifling defects; and among these is sometimes named a diminution of popular interest in poetic literature. Some have attributed this decline to one cause, some to another; but the fact can hardly be disputed. The Heavenly Muse is suffering a partial eclipse. The gross and material substance of the earth has somehow got between her and the Soul, that source and centre of her gentle light; and some enthusiasts aver that with the progress of Science and the production at will of its precise and steadfast lights, fitful luminaries of night may henceforth be dispensed with. But spiritual eclipses, though not to be predicted with the accuracy with which physical eclipses are foretold, and though unfortunately they endure for longer periods, are equally transitory; and the nineteenth century was scarcely original, nor will its successor prove to be correct, in fancying that the garish and obedient flame of material philosophy will prove a satisfactory substitute for the precious, if precarious illumination of the Spirit.

Among the causes that have contributed to divert popular affection and popular sympathy from poetical literature, there are three that deserve to be specially indicated. The first of these is the multiplication of prose romances, which, though so much lower in literary value and in artistic character than poetry, and so much less elevating in their tendency, are better fitted to stimulate the vulgar imagination, and minister more freely to the common craving for excitement. The second cause is the reaction that has settled upon mankind from the fervid hopes inspired by the propagation of those theories and the propounding of those promises which the historian associates with the French Revolution. All saner minds have long since discovered that happiness is to be procured neither for the individual nor for the community by mere political changes; and the discovery has been distinctly hostile to literary enthusiasm. Finally, many poets, and nearly all the critics of poetry, in our time, seem determined to alienate ordinary human beings from contact with the Muse. The world is easily persuaded that it is an ignoramus; and the vast majority of people, after being told, year after year, that what they do not understand is poetry, and what they do not care one straw about is the proper theme and the highest expression of song, end by concluding that poetry has become a mystery beyond their intelligence, a sort of freemasonry from whose symbols they are jealously excluded. Unable to appreciate what the critics tell them are the noblest productions of genius, they modestly infer that between genius and themselves there is no method of communication; and incapable of reading with pleasure the poetry they are assured ought to fill them with rapture, they desist from reading poetry altogether. They have not the self-confidence to choose their own poets and select their own poetry; and indeed in these days, the only chance any writer has of being read is that he should first be greatly talked about. Thus, what between the poets who are talked about by so-called experts, and thus made notorious, but whom ordinary folks find unreadable, and the poets, if there be any such, whom ordinary folks would read with pleasure if they knew of their existence, but of whom they have scarcely heard, poetry has become “caviare to the general,” who content themselves with the coarser flavour of the novel, and the more easily digested pabulum of the newspaper.

But if poetry is now comparatively little read, no one can deny that it is much written about; and many persons would perhaps see in the second of these facts a reason for doubting the reality of the first. But the contradiction is only apparent. Poetry is the subject at present of much prose criticism, prose exposition, and prose controversy; but the controversialists are largely the poets themselves, or those who aspire to the title. The subject is treated by them with much earnestness, indeed with some little heat; and it is easy to perceive that the main object of most of the disputants is to establish the superiority of the poet whom the critic himself most admires, and possibly whom he himself most resembles. The controversy rages around those poets alone who are claimed by the nineteenth century, and practically, these are five in number; Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Each of these has his votaries, his disciples, his passionate advocates. The public look on, a little bewildered; for who is to decide when doctors disagree? Few, if any, of the disputants lay down explicit canons respecting poetry, which may enable a competent bystander to play the part of umpire even to his own satisfaction; and he is left, like the controversialists themselves, to abide by his own personal tastes, and to estimate poets and poetry according to his individual fancy.

It was therefore with no slight satisfaction one heard that one of our poets, who is likewise a critic, but who brings to his criticisms moderation of language and measure of statement, was about to appraise the English poets who have written in this century, but who have for many years joined the Immortals. To Mr. Matthew Arnold, if to any one amongst us, may be applied the passage from Wordsworth, to be found in the “Supplementary Essay” published in 1815:

Whither then shall we turn for that union of qualifications which must necessarily exist before the decisions of a critic can be of absolute value? For a mind at once poetical and philosophical; for a critic whose affections are as free and kindly as the spirit of society, and whose understanding is severe as that of dispassionate government? Where are we to look for that initiatory composure of mind which no selfishness can disturb; for a natural sensibility that has been tutored into correctness, without losing anything of its quickness; and for active faculties, capable of answering the demands which an author of original imagination shall make upon them, associated with a judgment that cannot be duped into admiration by aught that is unworthy of it? Among those, and those only, who, never having suffered their youthful love of poetry to remit much of its force, have applied to the consideration of the laws of this art the best power of their understandings.

To Mr. Arnold, if to any, we say, this enumeration of the qualities indispensable to a trustworthy critic of poetry, may be applied; and if the conclusions at which he bids us to arrive should not turn out to be such as we can wholly accept, at least we shall have the satisfaction of feeling that we dissent from one who has not invited our attention in vain, and who perhaps, by the avowals he incidentally makes in the course of his argument, has enabled us to hold with all the more confidence certain opinions which we will endeavour to establish by independent reasons of our own.

Here, with sufficient brevity for the present, is the conclusion of Mr. Arnold on the vexed question of the primacy among English poets, no longer living, of the last century:

I place Wordsworth’s poetry above Byron’s, on the whole, although in some points he was greatly Byron’s inferior. But these two, Wordsworth and Byron, stand, it seems to me, first and pre-eminent in actual performance, a glorious pair, among the English poets of this century. Keats had probably, indeed, a more consummate poetic gift than either of them; but he died having produced too little and being as yet too immature to rival them. I for my part can never ever think of equalling with them any other of their contemporaries; either Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium; or Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain. Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves. When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century which has just then ended, the first names with her will be these.

We do not propose to traverse the entire field of controversy here lightly indicated; our purpose being to confine ourselves to a consideration of Mr. Arnold’s particular conclusion, that Wordsworth’s poetry should be placed above Byron’s. But before passing to that duty, we may say, parenthetically, that though we agree with Mr. Arnold that Shelley’s poetry often exhibits a lamentable “want of sound subject-matter,” the claims of the “beautiful and ineffectual angel” are here somewhat summarily dismissed; and that when Mr. Arnold says further that he “doubts whether Shelley’s delightful Essays and Letters, which deserve to be far more read than they are now, will not resist the wear and tear of time better, and finally come to stand higher than his poetry,” he makes us lift our eyes in sheer amazement, and somewhat more than doubt whether this will not prove to be among the utterly falsified prophecies of very able critics.

Holding the opinion he does concerning Wordsworth and Byron, Mr. Arnold has published a selection from the works of both, in distinct and separate volumes, and he believes that he has thereby rendered an equal service to each. “Alone,” he writes, “among our poets of the earlier part of this century, Byron and Wordsworth not only furnish material enough for a volume of this kind, but also, it seems to me, they both of them gain considerably by being thus exhibited.” We, on the contrary, submit that if the comparison is to end here, and is to be confined to the results produced by Mr. Arnold’s method, a more unjust and inadequate method, as far as Byron is concerned, could not possibly be resorted to. Wordsworth gains considerably, but Byron loses considerably, to employ Mr. Arnold’s language, by being thus exhibited. No doubt, Mr. Arnold means to be just. He always means to be just. But in the very description he gives of the contents of these two volumes on their respective title-pages, does he not betray a sort of unconscious consciousness that he is dealing with two very different poets, and with two poets whose works are very different? If this be not so, how comes it that he calls one volume “Poems” of Wordsworth, and the other “Poetry” of Byron? The distinction is a genuine one. Indeed, it is something more than genuine; it was inevitable, and Mr. Arnold was obliged to make it, if the title of each volume was to describe its contents correctly. The best poems of Wordsworth are short, most of them remarkably short; and therefore, in a volume of selections from his works, they can without difficulty be presented in their integrity. The best poems of Byron, like the best poems of Æschylus, of Virgil, of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton, are of considerable length; and if selections from Byron are to be made, his best poems must be mutilated for the purpose. Mr. Arnold has mutilated them accordingly. Thus, while intending to treat Wordsworth and Byron in precisely the same manner, he has treated them, and by the very conditions of the case could not help treating them, in an entirely different manner.

That Mr. Arnold has not been altogether insensible to this objection – and, indeed, with his calm and dispassionate penetration, he was not likely to be – is apparent not only in the different description he gives of the contents of the two volumes, on their respective title-pages, but from certain observations in his prefatory essay upon Byron. When he says that “there are portions of Byron’s poetry which are far higher in worth, and far more free from fault than others,” or that “Byron cannot but be a gainer by having attention concentrated upon what is vivid, powerful, effective, in his work, and withdrawn from what is not so,” he is, we would suggest, stating nothing more than a truism, or what is equally true of every poet. He is only beating the air, and hesitating to close with the real difficulty with which he feels himself confronted. But when he proceeds to urge that “Byron has not a great artist’s profound and patient skill in combining an action or in developing a character, – a skill which we must watch and follow if we are to do justice to it,” he shows that he feels it to be necessary to offer a defence for applying to Byron a treatment from which Byron may possibly suffer. We confess, with all our admiration for Mr. Arnold – and it is as deep as it is sincere – we have never been able to resist the suspicion that he is tant soit peu a sophist; and surely it is sophistry, in the course of an attempt to show that Byron and Wordsworth each equally gain by the “selection” method of treatment, to urge, with that air of tranquil and well-bred triumph of which Mr. Arnold is so consummate a master, that “to take passages from work produced as Byron’s was, is a very different thing from taking passages out of the Œdipus or the Tempest and deprives the poetry far less of its advantage”? For the question is not whether Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Byron may be treated ostensibly in the same manner by an editor of selections, without injustice being done to any of them, but whether Wordsworth and Byron can. That is the question; and it is not answered, but avoided, by altering the terms of the proposition.

What, therefore, really remains of this plea of Mr. Arnold’s, this excuse for mutilating Byron’s poems and presenting them in fragments, is the allegation that Byron is not, above and before all things, a great, patient, and systematic artist. That much may be granted; and no competent critic would deny it. But more cannot be granted than is strictly true; and candour equally demands that it should be admitted that though Byron was not long-suffering and far-reaching enough in the conception of his poems, nor careful and self-critical enough in their execution, he possessed at least enough of the instinct and the scope of the artist to produce works that cohere with themselves, and that have a unity of design sufficiently definite to mark it as something distinct from the mere succession of executed detail. Will Mr. Arnold seriously pretend that a more “vivid, powerful, and effective” impression is not created upon the mind by a perusal of the whole of Manfred, than by a perusal of portions of it, or of one or two dissociated Acts? Mr. Arnold turns Byron’s own modest confessions against himself, and lays stress upon the avowal that the Giaour is “a string of passages.” But if any one were, after due reflection, to maintain, that more justice is done to Byron by reading some of its passages than by reading the whole of the poem, we confess we should be obliged to entertain some doubt as to his own instincts as an artist. For, where men like Byron are concerned, it is peculiarly true that the divinity of the Muse shapes their ends, rough-hew these how they may. Of every one of Byron’s tales – the Siege of Corinth, The Bride of Abydos, Parisina– this is equally true. It has more than once been observed that Childe Harold suffers from the fact that a period of eight years elapsed between the composition of the first and second cantos, and the composition of the third and fourth; and as far as style is concerned, the contrast is very striking, two of the cantos being for the most part almost as feeble, and two of them as forcible, as anything deserving the name of poetry well can be. Nevertheless, there would be no difficulty in showing, and we think no reader of poetry endowed with a fair amount of artistic sense would require to be shown, that a certain oneness of purpose and unity of drift presides over and accompanies the entire poem, in a word that it is substantially homogeneous; and if any one, after reading through the third and fourth cantos at a stretch, as we recently did, were to tell us that he thought a few extracts from each give an adequate conception of the two, and that reading portions is in effect equivalent to reading the whole, we should have reached that limit of controversy which is expressed by a silence that is not assent. It is true that Mr. Arnold has been fairly lavish in his extracts from Childe Harold; yet out of the 300 stanzas which compose the third and fourth cantos, his selection contains only 114, or little more than a third. But it is not only by the curtailment of the quantity, but by the treatment applied to what is selected, that injury is done to Childe Harold. The passages quoted are scattered at intervals through the volume, so that all consecutiveness and coherence are lost. The majestic march of the poem is utterly broken. The subtle argument that lurks in the order of every poem – whether it be the lucidus ordo of a speech, or an order less obvious and patent – is completely destroyed. The strain neither begins nor ends, neither rises nor falls, neither pauses nor progresses. The statue is shivered to pieces, and we are offered a collection of chips, mixed up with fragments from other marbles that have been treated with equal ruthlessness. Here there is a hand, here a portion of a foot, here a section of the features, here a bit of the torso. They still are magnificent, and full of suggestiveness. But are they equal and equivalent to the entire statue? Are they as good as the whole of the original work? With surprising paradox Mr. Arnold assures us they are considerably better.

This singular conclusion is attained, it seems to us, by the excessive assertion, or at least by the exaggerated application, of a theory in which there is, unquestionably, a solid element of truth. We have said that Byron is not an austere and consistent artist. But that is not to affirm that he is not an artist at all; whereas, in thus treating his productions fragmentarily, Mr. Arnold acts as though such an assertion were true. Byron, says Mr. Arnold, is not “architectural.” But is he not? There is architecture, and architecture; the severe and systematic architecture of the Greeks, and the more free, irregular, unmethodical architecture which we know as Gothic. In the conception, and what in technical parlance is called the composition, of his works, Byron is assuredly no Greek. The exquisite oneness of design characteristic of Athenian genius he certainly did not borrow from the land and the race no one has so splendidly extolled. But if we turn to some of the noblest productions of Gothic architecture, what do we find? We find Cathedrals of unquestioned beauty and of universal fame, produced, it would superficially seem, almost haphazard; without design, without plan, even without architect. In our own land we may see Minsters that, begun in the eleventh, were not finished till the fifteenth century. Like Childe Harold, they bear the evident marks of different ages, and of different styles; and like Don Juan, they show that they were commenced without their parent knowing where or how they were to end. Nay, like it again, some of them remain unfinished to this day. But will any one affirm that their integrity, as they stand, is nothing to them, and nothing to us? Because no great master-conception presided over their origin and their execution, will no injury be done to them by taking them to pieces, and saying, “Here is a lovely apse; here you see a beautiful flying buttress; here contemplate an exquisite rood-screen; here you have an admirable bit of the choir, and there a glorious specimen of the roof”?

Nor can it be urged that this illustration does violence to the process Mr. Arnold has adopted. On the contrary, the analogy is not strong enough; for Manfred, The Corsair, Cain, Childe Harold itself, were conceived and executed, not less, but far more homogeneously, than the edifices with which we have compared them, and if it would be unjust and inadequate to treat Gothic cathedrals after this fashion, it is still more unjust and inadequate to treat Byron’s poems after this fashion. More glaring still becomes the injustice, and more utter the inadequacy, when we remember in whose company he is so treated. Mr. Arnold does not break Wordsworth’s poems to pieces and present us with the fragments; for there is no necessity to do so. The long ones Mr. Arnold cheerfully throws over, confessing that The Excursion “can never be a satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry,” and even that Jeffrey was not wrong when he said of it, “This will never do.” To adhere to our metaphor, it is a large comfortless Meeting-house; and so is the Recluse. The best of Wordsworth’s poems, as we have said, and as Mr. Arnold says, are his short ones. There are charming English cottages, or, if it be preferred – for we have no intention of decrying them, we admire them vastly – exquisite little wayside chapels; and they fit conveniently into the space, without being tampered with, which Mr. Arnold has provided for them. But the best of Byron’s poems are the long ones; are vast Gothic edifices that soar high into the air and cover a vast amount of ground, and therefore cannot be compressed into the same compass. We have seen how Mr. Arnold gets over the difficulty. He pulls them down, places bits and sections of them side by side with the untouched cottages and still complete oratories of Wordsworth, and asks us to compare the two. We are far from saying that, even under these conditions, the comparison ends to Byron’s disadvantage. But it surely must be evident to every one that the conditions are not equal, and therefore, however fair were the intentions of the editor, that they are not really just. We should be sorry if any one supposed we consider Mr. Swinburne as sound a critic as Mr. Arnold. But, upon this particular question, Mr. Swinburne has propounded a conclusion against which, we submit, Mr. Arnold contends in vain. “The greatest of Byron’s works was his whole work taken together.” Nothing could be more terse or more true; and if Mr. Swinburne would be content always to form his judgments thus calmly and comprehensively, and to express them with this brevity and directness, he would soon come to exercise an authority which is at present refused by many to his literary verdicts.

But though, if the comparison instituted between Byron and Wordsworth by Mr. Arnold were to be confined within the conditions he has imposed on both alike, great injustice would be done to Byron, it may well be doubted if the plan adopted by Mr. Arnold will really tend to Byron’s disadvantage. On the contrary we suspect that, with the best will in the world to do all he can for Wordsworth, Mr. Arnold has done him rather an ill turn. For the whole, or anything approaching to the whole, of the best of Byron, is not to be found in the volume of selections edited by Mr. Arnold; and everybody will feel that Byron is a far greater poet than he could possibly be made to appear by any such method. But all the best poetry of Wordsworth is in the volume Mr. Arnold dedicates to him; and we entertain little doubt that there is no dispassionate critic who would not be obliged to allow that a considerable portion, indeed we fear the greater portion of it, is not poetry at all. The process Mr. Arnold has applied to Wordsworth, will have to be applied over again, and with greater rigour. He has rejected as “not satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry,” an immense quantity of what Wordsworth conceived to be such. Another editor will have to reject a considerable proportion of what Mr. Arnold has too indulgently included. His selection will have to be selected from afresh; and thus, with doubtful friendliness, he has pointed and prepared the way for some entirely dispassionate critic who will leave of Wordsworth only what, to “the disinterested lover of poetry,” is worth leaving; and this unfortunately, though of a high and delightful quality, will prove to be comparatively little. In a word, to do Byron anything like justice, we require several volumes of the size of that Mr. Arnold devotes to him; we require, in fact, most of what he wrote. To do Wordsworth justice, we require a volume less than half the size of what Mr. Arnold gives us; we require, in fact, to suppress at least three-fourths of what he wrote.

But, again, we can raise no question, and propound no conclusion which Mr. Arnold, with his penetrating sense and acute susceptibility, has not himself more or less discerned. After observing, “we must be on our guard against Wordsworthians,” he thus writes, in a vein of delicate humour:

I have spoken lightly of Wordsworthians: and if we are to get Wordsworth recognised by the public and by the world, we must recommend him not in the spirit of a clique, but in the spirit of disinterested lovers of poetry. But I am a Wordsworthian myself. I can read with pleasure and edification Peter Bell, and the whole series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and the addresses to Mr. Wilkinson’s spade, and even the Thanksgiving Ode; everything of Wordsworth, I think, except Vaudracour and Julia. It is not for nothing that one has been brought up in the veneration of a man so truly worthy of homage; that one has seen and heard him, lived in his neighbourhood, and been familiar with his country.

Alas! even the best of us are mortal; and we accept this graceful passage as Mr. Arnold’s confession that he, too, is a Wordsworthian against whom we must be on our guard. An extremist of a school he could not now be; but “it is not for nothing,” as he says, that he was trained in it. “Once a priest,” says an Italian proverb, “always a priest”; and, we fear, once a Wordsworthian, always a Wordsworthian. It is no reproach; but “we must be on our guard.” For our part, we are tolerably familiar with Wordsworth’s country, but, beyond that, we are under no such spell as Mr. Arnold confesses to above. We entertain profound veneration and homage for Wordsworth, but it is the result, not so much of early teaching – the most difficult of all lessons to unlearn – as of independent admiration and sympathy inspired in riper years. We, too, can read Peter Bell and the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, but with more edification than pleasure; and we have read, afresh, every word of what Mr. Arnold has included in his Poems of Wordsworth, only to reach the conclusion we have already stated, that from many, only too many of them, the spirit, the essence, the indefinable something, of poetry is absent.