""On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened, Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned, Now his huge bulk o"er Afric"s sands careened, Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that p.r.i.c.ked his scars With memory of the old revolt from Awe, He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of Heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.""
"Suppose my contention--that poetry should concern itself with universals--to be admitted: suppose we all agreed that Poetry is an expression of the universal element in human life, that (as Sh.e.l.ley puts it) "a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth."
There remains a question quite as important: and that is, How to recognise the Universal when we see it? We may talk of a Divine law, or a Divine order--call it what we will--which regulates the lives of us poor men no less than the motions of the stars, and binds the whole universe, high and low, into one system: and we may have arrived at the blessed wish to conform with this law rather than to strive and kick against the p.r.i.c.ks and waste our short time in petulant rebellion. So far, so good: but how are we to know the law? How, with the best will in the world, are we to distinguish order from disorder? What a.s.surance have we, after striving to bring ourselves into obedience, that we have succeeded? We may agree, for example, with Wordsworth that Duty is a stern daughter of the Voice of G.o.d, and that through Duty "the most ancient heavens," no less than we ourselves, are kept fresh and strong. But can we always discern this Universal, this Duty? What is the criterion? And what, when we have chosen, is the sanction of our choice?
"A number of honest people will promptly refer us to revealed religion.
"Take (they say) your revealed religion on faith, and there you have the law and the prophets, and your universals set out for you, and your principles of conduct laid down. What more do you want?"
"To this I answer, "We are human, and we need also the testimony of Poetry; and the priceless value of poetry for us lies in this, that it does _not_ echo the Gospel like a parrot. If it did, it would be servile, superfluous. It is ministerial and useful because it approaches truth by another path. It does not say ditto to Mr. Burke--it corroborates. And it corroborates precisely because it does not say ditto, but employs a natural process of its own which it employed before ever Christianity was revealed. You may decide that religion is enough for you, and that you have no need of poetry; but if you have any intelligent need of poetry it will be because poetry, though it end in the same conclusions, reaches them by another and separate path.
"Now (as I understand him) Mr. Meredith connects man with the Universal, and teaches him to arrive at it and recognise it by strongly reminding him that he is a child of Earth. "You are amenable," he says in effect, "to a law which all the firmament obeys. But in all that firmament you are tied to one planet, which we call Earth. If therefore you would apprehend the law, study your mother, Earth, which also obeys it. Search out her operations; honour your mother as legitimate children, and let your honour be the highest you can pay--that of making yourself docile to her teaching. So will you stand the best chance, the only likely chance, of living in harmony with that Will which over-arches Earth and us all."
"In this doctrine Mr. Meredith believes pa.s.sionately; so let there be no mistake about the thoroughness with which he preaches it.
Even prayer, he tells us in one of his novels, is most useful when like a fountain it falls back and draws refreshment from earth for a new spring heavenward:--
""And there vitality, there, there solely in song Besides, where earth and her uses to men, their needs, Their forceful cravings, the theme are: there is it strong, The Master said: and the studious eye that reads, (Yea, even as earth to the crown of G.o.ds on the mount), In links divine with the lyrical tongue is bound.
Pursue thy craft: it is music drawn of the fount To spring perennial; well-spring is common ground."
"And it follows that to one who believes in the teaching of earth so whole-heartedly earth is not a painted back-cloth for man to strut against and att.i.tudinise, but a birth-place from which he cannot escape, and in relation with which he must be considered, and must consider himself, on pain of becoming absurd. Even:
""His cry to heaven is a cry to her He would evade."
"She is a stern mother, be it understood, no coddling one:--
""He may entreat, aspire, He may despair, and she has never heed, She, drinking his warm sweat, will soothe his need, Not his desire."
"When we neglect or misread her lessons, she punishes; at the best, she offers no fat rewards to the senses, but--
""The sense of large charity over the land; Earth"s wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough, And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal."
"("Lean fare," as the poet observes; and unpalatable, for instance, to our Members of Parliament, to whom our Mr. Balfour one evening paid the highest compliment within their range of apprehension by a.s.suming that quite a large number of them could write cheques for 69,000 pounds without inconvenience.) At the best, too, she offers, with the loss of things we have desired, a serene fort.i.tude to endure their loss:--
""Love born of knowledge, love that gains Vitality as Earth it mates, The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains, The Life, the Death, illuminates.
""For love we Earth, then serve we all; Her mystic secret then is ours: We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded--as beholds her flowers
""Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning"s mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire."
"But at least it is the true milk for man that she distils--
""From her heaved breast of sacred common mould";
"The breast (to quote from another poem)--
""Which is his well of strength, his home of rest, And fair to scan."
"And so Mr. Meredith, having diagnosed our disease, which is Self-- our "distempered devil of Self," gluttonous of its own enjoyments and therefore necessarily a foe to law, which rests on temperance and self-control--walks among men like his own wise physician, Melampus, with eyes that search the book of Nature closely, as well for love of her as to discover and extract her healing secrets.
""With love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in gra.s.ses and rubble of woody wreck; Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; Or cast their web between bramble and th.o.r.n.y hook; The good physician Melampus, loving them all, Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book.
""For him the woods were a home and gave him the key Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers.
The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours. . . ."
"Here by another road we come to a teaching which is also the Gospels": that to apprehend the highest truth one must have a mind of extreme humility. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,"
"Neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo there! for behold the kingdom of G.o.d is within you," "And He took a little child and set him in the midst of them," &c. Poetry cannot make these sayings any truer than they are, but it can illuminate for us the depths of their truth, and so (be it humbly said) can help their acceptance by man. If they come down from heaven, derived from arguments too high for his ken, poetry confirms them by arguments taken from his own earth, instructing him the while to read it as--
""An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet Buried, and breathing, and to be,"
"And teaching him, "made lowly wise," that the truth of the highest heavens lies scattered about his feet.
""Melampus dwelt among men, physician and sage, He served them, loving them, healing them; sick or maimed, Or them that frenzied in some delirious rage Outran the measure, his juice of the woods reclaimed.
He played on men, as his master Phoebus on strings Melodious: as the G.o.d did he drive and check, Through love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in gra.s.ses and rubble of woody wreck."
"I think, if we consider the essence of this teaching, we shall have no difficulty now in understanding why Mr. Meredith"s hopes harp so persistently on the "young generations," why our duty to them is to him "the cry of the conscience of life," or why, as he studies Earth, he maintains that--
""Deepest at her springs, Most filial, is an eye to love her young.""
"But Meredith, if a true poet, is also and undeniably a hard one: and a poet must not only preach but persuade. "He dooth not only show the way,"
says Sidney, "but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will intice any man to enter into it."
"Here, my dear X, I lay hands on you and drag you in as the Conscientious Objector. "How?" you will ask. "Is not the plain truth good enough for men? And if poetry must win acceptance for her by beautiful adornments, alluring images, captivating music, is there not something deceptive in the business, even if it be not downright dishonest?" Well, I think you have a right to be answered."
"Thank you," said X.
"And I don"t think you are convincingly answered by Keats"--
""Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
"With all respect to the poet, we don"t know it; and if we did it would come a long way short of all we need to know. The Conscientious Objector will none the less maintain that truth and beauty have never been recognised as identical, and that, in practice, to employ their names as convertible terms would lead to no end of confusion. I like the man (you will be glad to hear), because on an important subject he will be satisfied with nothing less than clear thinking. My own suspicion is that, when we have yielded him the inquiry which is his due into the relations between truth and beauty, we shall discover that spiritual truth--with which alone poetry concerns itself--is less a matter of ascertained facts than of ascertained harmonies, and that these harmonies are incapable of being expressed otherwise than in beautiful terms.
But pending our inquiry (which must be a long one) let us put to the objector a practical question: "What forbids a man, who has the truth to tell, from putting it as persuasively as possible? Were not the truths of the Gospel conveyed in parables? And is their truth diminished because these parables are exquisite in form and in language? Will you only commend persuasiveness in a sophist who engages to make the worst argument appear the better, and condemn it in a teacher who employs it to enforce truth?" The question, surely, is answered as soon as we have asked it.
"And the further particular question, Is Mr. Meredith a persuasive poet?
will be answered as promptly by us. He can be--let us grant--a plaguily forbidding one. His philosophy is not easy; yet it seems to me a deal easier than many of his single verses. I hope humbly, for instance, one of these days, to discover what is meant by such a verse as this:--
""Thou animatest ancient tales, To prove our world of linear seed; Thy very virtue now a.s.sails A tempter to mislead."
"Faint, yet pursuing, I hope; but I must admit that such writing does not obviously allure, that it rather dejects the student by the difficulty of finding a stool to sit down and be stoical on. "Nay," to parody Sidney, "he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a handful of nuts, forgetting the nut-crackers." He is, in short, half his time forbiddingly difficult, and at times to all appearance so deliberately and yet so wantonly difficult, that you wonder what on earth you came out to pursue and why you should be tearing your flesh in these thickets.
"And then you remember the swinging cadences of "Love in the Valley"
--the loveliest love-song of its century. Who can forget it?
""Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star, Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o"er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.