LIFE IN POETRY: POETICAL DECADENCE1 IN my last two lectures 2 I traced the conditions under which Poetry comes into existence in the mind of the poet, and the manner in which it clothes itself with external form. I showed that it was the product of the harmonious fusion of two contrary elements, the Universal and the Individual. By the Universal element I mean what we often call by the name Nature: whatever is furnished naturally to the poet's conception by forces outside himself; the sources of inspiration springing from the religion, tradition, civilisation, education of the country to which he belongs; the general mental atmosphere of the age in which he lives; the common law of the language in which he composes. By the Individual element I mean what we usually call Art; including all that is contributed by the genius of the poet, and that helps to constitute the characteristic form or mould in which the universal idea is expressed. I shall in my present lecture go further, and try to pursue the course of Life in Poetry in the history of the art, because the Art of Poetry has a life of its own, exactly analogous to the life of individual men and of States, proceeding from infancy to maturity and from maturity to decay. Great poetry of any kind is, as a rule, produced within certain well-defined periods of a nation's history, and the culminating point in every such kind of poetry is reached by a gradual ascent to the work of some great representative or classic poet. When this point has been reached we generally find an equally regular course of declension, represented by poets not without genius, but whose work is always characterised by certain common defects, which denote the exhaustion of the art and give warning of its approaching end. In the Greek epic, for example, Homer, representing the zenith of the art, has for his successors the literary composers of the Alexandrian period; and these again have their epigoni in poets like the Pseudo-Musæus. In the history of the Attic drama, the movement of decline begins almost insensibly with Euripides, but proceeds with increasing speed in the days of Agathon and other tragedians, whose names Time has not cared to preserve. A lecture delivered in the University of Oxford on the 6th of March, 1897. 2 Published in the Nineteenth Century for August 1896 and February 1897. The epigrammatists of Alexandria are the only representatives left, after the fourth century, of all the lyric singers of the free Greek cities; and thus by degrees the voice of Greek poetry dies into silence. Latin epic poetry declines from the height to which it has been raised by Virgil, through Lucan to Statius, from Statius to Claudian, from Claudian to nothingness. The English poetical drama, culminating in Shakespeare, moves downward to Massinger, and expires in the rhyming tragedies of Dryden and Lee. The ethical and didactic poetry of England, arriving at its grand climacteric in Pope, shows a dwindling force in Johnson and Goldsmith, and reaches its last stage of senility in the sounding emptiness of Erasmus Darwin. Now, this law of progress and decline, which is common to all the fine arts, may, I think, be formulated as follows. In the infancy of poetry or painting the universal element of life predominates over the individual; men's imaginative conceptions, as we see in the work of Giotto and Chaucer, are stronger than their powers of technical expression. In the maturity of art there is a perfect balance of the two opposing elements, as shown in the works of Raphael and Sophocles and Shakespeare. In the decadence of art, the individual overbalances the universal: we come to the stage either of insipid mannerism, exemplified in the paintings of Carlo Dolci and the poetry of Rogers; or of violent exaggeration, such as we find in the pictures of Michael Angelo Caravaggio, and in tragedies like those of Seneca and Nathaniel Lee. I shall ask you therefore to consider the symptoms that betoken the decline of poetry from its culminating point; and I shall take my illustrations from different periods, which, by universal critical consent, are periods of decadence. The subject is indeed a vast one, but I think I shall be able to establish the truths which I am anxious to impress upon you, by presenting the matter in three aspects: (1) The Decline of the Universal in Ages of Poetical Decadence. (2) The Exaggeration of the Individual in such ages. (3) The Abdication by Society of its right of judgment in questions of Poetry and Art. Now, as regards the Decline of the Universal, the most vivid examples of this phenomenon are furnished by the history of Greek poetry, because the Greek genius was so comprehensive that there was no form of poetical expression in which it did not produce work of the highest excellence. Let us in the first place make our observations on the ground of Greek drama. Probably few critics would care to contest the opinion that the culminating point of Greek tragedy is to be found in the Edipus Rex and indeed the reason for this is plain. In the early days of the Greek drama the universal predominated strongly over the individual. Everyone who listens to me knows that the form of Greek drama was worked out almost instinctively by means of a union between the Greek myths and the Chorus, which was the original mouthpiece of the worship of Dionysus. Now, the essence of the drama lies in the exhibition of action; but even as late as the time of Eschylus the religious, or didactic, or universal element in tragic conception was so powerful that, in plays like the Agamemnon and the Eumenides, though the course of the action is well defined, the Chorus seems to be a more important part of the whole structure than the actors themselves. In the Edipus Rex, on the other hand, there is a perfect balance between Nature and Art; the moral of the play is expressed mainly by means of the action. Pity and terror are aroused by the tragic order in which the events are made to succeed each other; the elevation to which the hero is raised by his genius and wisdom before the great TEρITÉTELA to which he is exposed; the irony which makes the whole horror of the situation apparent to the spectators, while the person most affected remains unconscious of the truth; the crash of ruin in which he is involved by the antecedent sins of others rather than by his own-all this is as much in accordance with the Greek sense of religion as are the doctrines of the Chorus in the tragedies of Æschylus; and it is more in harmony with the nature of the drama as a form of poetic art. But when we come to Euripides, with whom begins the period of tragic decadence, the state of the ideal atmosphere has manifestly changed. Poet and audience have both lost much of their old religious belief, and this mental change brings with it a great change in the form of the drama. The Chorus, no longer the natural mouthpiece of the universal feeling of awe and reverence, dwindles into a mere instrument for the invention of new melodies; on the other hand, the story is not arranged for the purpose of bringing out the moral, but to display the poet's ingenuity in the construction of his plot, or some other kind of artistic cleverness. And this tendency was doubtless strongly developed by Agathon, who, if there is any truth in Aristophanes' representation of him in the Thesmophoriazusa, must have been a typical representative of those who follow art for art's sake. Let us now turn to the Greek epic, and contrast the work of its maturity and decadence as illustrated in the Iliad and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. One of the most striking characteristics in Homer's poetry is the richness and variety of its materials, the universal nature of its interest. The poet is at once a theologian, a statesman, a moralist, and-observe this particularly-a painter. There is scarcely an object in nature which he does not represent; and yet so perfect in him is the balance between the universal and the individual, that each of his conceptions is placed in its just relation for the purposes of art. Those exquisite touches of pathos, seeming to spring instinctively out of the narrative; those lofty strokes of rhetoric, so proper to the occasion; those detailed descriptions which embody the very genius of painting-all is adapted to elevate, to humanise, to relieve the progress of the action. How different is the case with Apollonius Rhodius! The master from whom Virgil learned so much was no mean poet; but in him whatever is excellent comes scarcely at all from the universality of human interest which abounds in the Iliad: almost everything depends on the ingenuity of the artist. I do not remember in the Argonautica a single passage of natural pathos, a single general reflection or observation universally true, a single effort of soul-stirring rhetoric. All these elements have disappeared from the life of the epic; what remains to it is the genius of painting. Apollonius's descriptions are admirable, whether he exerts himself to paint the external symptoms of love in Medea, or to heighten a scene of romantic adventure. As a specimen of his powers in the latter class take his description of Medea hypnotising the snake that guarded the Golden Fleece,3 which may be translated thus: When to his ears the sweet enchantment came, A languor shuddered through the serpent's frame. As swells a sudden wave mid Ocean's sleep, This reminds one of Turner's picture of Apollo killing the Python. It is the work of a great painter. And yet how inferior to Homer is Apollonius even on his own ground! Homer will often stand still to breathe his imagination, in the midst of his rapid narrative, by elaborating a simile; but he never does this without making the simile really illustrate the action. For instance, he illustrates his account of Agamemnon watching the mustering of the troops of the two Ajaces by the following simile: As when from a rock a herdman sees a cloud coming over the sea before the blast of the west wind, and as he stands afar off, it seems to be rushing across the sea blacker than pitch, carrying with it a mighty whirlwind; and as he looks he shudders, and drives his flock under a cave.' Apollonius admired and imitated Homer's manner of painting: he is even more picturesque than Homer himself; but there is this difference between them, that the poet of Alexandria introduces similes that do not Iliad, book iv, 275. 3 Argonautica, book iv. 149-161. illustrate anything, merely for the sake of the painting. Here is a characteristic example. As when a sunbeam plays on the side of a house, reflected from water which has just been poured into a cistern, or perhaps a pail: hither and thither it dances on the quick eddy ; even so '-What? even so the maiden's heart in her breast was tossing, and tears of pity flowed from her eyes.' 5 Or take this, which is still more elaborate: As when a poor working woman heaps straws under a burning log, while she is at her task of spinning wool, that she may make a blaze for herself at night beneath her roof, waking betimes; and the flame rising wondrously from the little log consumes all the straw.' A very charming and pathetic picture! But what do you suppose this poor working woman is like? Why, once more, Medea in love. Even so,' says the poet, beneath her breast cruel love burned always secretly, and he changed her tender cheek from red to pale by reason of the anguish of her mind.'6 Now, if one wishes to measure the decay of the universal in Greek epic poetry by a positive standard, just compare this kind of thing, which is really the best that Apollonius Rhodius can give, with the contrast between the eloquence of Menelaus and Odysseus as described by Antenor. You may feel the greatness of it in Pope's version : When Atreus' son harangued the listening train, Just was his sense, and his expression plain, As one unskilled or dumb, he seemed to stand, Nor raised his head, nor stretched his sceptred hand; But when he speaks, what elocution flows! Soft as the fleeces of descending snows, The copious accents fall, with easy art, Melting they fall, and sink into the heart." Thus, you see, in Greek poetry the drama declines and disappears : the epic declines and disappears. For a moment you have a flash of fine inventive genius in the Idylls of Theocritus. But look where Theocritus goes for his invention. Though the inspiration of poets in the great days of Greek art proceeded essentially from civic sources, Theocritus has to go into the country, and to refresh the jaded imagination of the effete Alexandrians with the rustic melodies of shepherd life. At last you have no distinctive form of poetry left to the Greek muse but the epigram. I am strongly tempted to linger over the Greek Anthology, and to show how much of the universal element in poetry, how much of the spirit of Nature, survived even in deca Argonautica, book iii. 756-761. Iliad, book iii. 213. 6 Ibid. book iii. 291-298. |