‘That criticism, though anonymous, was believed by many to be written by no other than Henry Fielding himself. Now when you get two men of the calibre of Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fielding writing in this manner, you simply dare not ignore them. They carry too much metal.
‘Before I leave the subject of Johnson I would ask, is he not a good illustration, in another manner, of the value of this now lost “contemporary touch”? Johnson was, by the unanimous voice of his age, the greatest writer of his period. There was no question about it. Gibbon was writing, Goldsmith was writing, Fielding was writing, and many another; but every one awarded the palm to Johnson. And he was also a voluminous writer. To-day, these writings are all dead — dead and buried, and have been so for many a long year. The “thrill” has died out of them, and, if Johnson’s posthumous fame depended on his writings alone, his name would be rarely heard. Johnson lives to us now, and very vigorous he is too, solely by virtue of his sayings and doings, chiefly his sayings, his table-talk, as reported, and very scrappily and imperfectly reported, by Boswell, Thrale, Sir Joshua Reynolds and one or two others. Now you will find all these diarists and recorders from time to time bursting out in the same way, “Oh if I had only put down more of this wonderful conversation, Oh if I could but remember more of all that he said that night — if I could but convey to my readers some of the fire and power and energy with which he treated this or that subject, then future generations might form some faint idea of what a man he was.” It is the thrill incommunicable over again. There were evenings at the Literary Club, when Johnson had been taking the floor and was in specially good form, when the members — distinguished men all of them — would walk home, silent and deeply moved, just like those youngsters after that first reading of In Memoriam, only able to gasp out at intervals, “What a Man!”, or words to that effect. But they all agreed, that it was impossible to give to posterity anything more than the merest echo of the real Johnson. And we know that they were right. Only his contemporaries could feel the real, the authentic, thrill.
‘Here, however, it is interesting to note, that it is just in our delight in these scraps and fragments of talk, whenever evidently reported faithfully and verbatim, that we seem to get nearest to his contemporaries’ feeling about him; and yet we know that that appreciation was based on his writings, not his talk, because naturally only a very few of his host of admirers ever even set eyes on the man. His writings, however, do not help us a bit, in the way that his reported talk does, to get into the skin of his contemporary admirers. They might of course help us if we ever read them, but we don’t and won’t — I might even say we can’t. I suppose the explanation is that, as compared with colloquial talk, all writing has a touch of artificiality about it, and the Essayists of the Eighteenth Century deliberately pushed this artifice to an extreme — almost as far as the short-lived Euphuists and Gongorists of the Sixteenth Century. They meant to be artificial, and they were. Really, at times, with Johnson you are not quite sure when you are reading English and when you are reading Latin; for example, here is a sentence from the Preface to the Dictionary singled out by Boswell for our special admiration: “When the radical idea branches out into parallel ramifications, how can a consecutive series be formed of senses in their own nature collateral?” The enraptured Boswell, heaving up his either hand, like the child in Herrick’s poem, declares this sentence to be “the perfections of Language”. And so it is, in a way — the eighteenth-century way. But not our way. They deliberately thought that the more English resembled Latin the better it must be. So thinking, they lost all flexibility; we, for our part, cannot and will not stand an inflexible language. The great crime of the Eighteenth-century Essayists was that they sinned deliberately, sinned against the light. For they were no pioneers, like Dante or Boccaccio, in Italy, blazing a track through a forest primeval, letting light and air into a dark jungle. No, they had before them, or more strictly speaking, behind them, the splendid corpus of work turned out by those sixteenth-century writers we roughly summarize under the name of the Tudor Translators, including, of course, the compilers of the Authorized Version of the Bible, writers of an English vivid, virile, picturesque and, above all, flexible, such as has never been written before or since, and they turned their backs on it all for the sake of a narrow Latinity, cramped and hidebound if, often, sonorous. To them the Elizabethans were barbarous, their style Gothic — Gothic spelt with a k or a que — and their penalty is that their translations lie piled on the floors of dusty garrets, while we can, and do, read to-day, with increasing delight, the distinctly less accurate, but always vivid and virile, translations of Sir Thomas North, Sir Thomas Urquhart, John Florio, and many another. It is strange indeed to reflect, that neither Boswell, nor Sir Joseph Banks, nor perhaps even Sir Joshua Reynolds himself, would have troubled to so much as glance at a page of those high histories which so delighted men like Sir Walter Raleigh or Sir Philip Sidney. It is strange too to consider that it was at this very period of arid Latinity that the passionate and romantic Ballads of the North Country — what we speak of as “The Border Ballads” — were beginning, for the first time, to assume literary shape and form. These things, I say, are strange, we can only recognize them, and wonder, and pass on.
‘To return to my subject, after all what I am really asking for is only that critics of to-day, and readers too for that matter, should recognize the force of this contemporary appeal and its reality, and in judging past work, should try and make themselves as contemporary as possible, so to speak, in the hope that they too may catch some faint vibration of the particular thrill. They will be the more likely to do justice to their subject. I was privileged recently to listen to a young poet delivering his apologia, or defence of the work of his particular school of poetry, and very interesting it was. To be sure I did not know that any one had attacked him, but he appeared to be on his defence, and in the course of such defence had to say something slightly disparaging about both Tennyson and, I think, Swinburne. This he was perfectly entitled to do, nor was he in the least unfair or even severe; but as I listened I could tell that he was making no allowance for, indeed probably did not realize, the special appeal of these two poets to their contemporaries, who included many men just as good as himself. Indeed, he would probably, if challenged, have refused to admit that such contemporary appeal possessed any value for the critic. Poetic merit, he would probably have said, is absolute, not relative. It either exists or it doesn’t. The passing of a generation or two cannot affect it. Well, that is true, but my point is that it is not the whole truth. There is a good deal of talk in the scientific world at present about something called Relativity. Well, I am afraid that what I am claiming is something like Relativity in poetic merit. That is, that the actual measurements of this merit may vary under varying conditions of time or space. But this is much too dangerous a subject for me, a layman, to dare to pursue it further. To take the case of Swinburne first. Now I dare say that when our young poet was in the nursery, and the nursemaid had corrected him on account of some youthful indiscretion, such as even young poets sometimes commit, that she added to the punishment some sarcastic remarks about the lilies and languor of virtue as compared with the roses and rapture of vice; and I dare say the young poet, between his sobs, would cry out, “O for heaven’s sake, Mary Ann, not that stale old cliche again.” And rightly, for by that time it was a stale old cliche and in the mouth of every nursemaid. What should he know, by that time, of the wonderful thrill that shook the reading world when the “Ballad of Dolores” made its appearance in the sixties?
‘How undergraduates of both universities, even Cambridge, rushed to each other’s rooms to shout it and declaim it, how they whooped and chortled over it, or dreamed and moaned it, in their sleep, how they parodied it and how, alas, they tried to write similar poetry with very indifferent success. “Thou wert fair,” this new poet sang,
‘“Thou wert fair in the fearless old fashion,
And thy limbs are as m
elodies yet.”
Limbs, if you please, in the sixties; up to then, there had been no limbs in England. Not a single limb. Now we have very little else, but it doesn’t really seem to make much difference, at least not the difference we thought it would make in the sixties, when poor Swinburne got all the blame for it. Then there was the rest of that wonderful “First Series” of Poems and Ballads, with its haunting, almost odorous atmosphere, and its medievalism which was yet a new medievalism; and, much about the same time, Atalanta in Calydon, with its ringing, dew-sprinkled choruses, beloved by dons and scholars even more than they were by undergraduates (because they were good enough to be set for Greek or Latin verse), those two books made a special appeal to their delighted audience of the sixties which they have never made to any later one. And of all this our young poet should have been well aware, from the report of others, and probably was aware, only, not perhaps counting such appeal as a literary virtue in itself, he was not inclined to give its inspirer any credit on that account.
‘To turn to Tennyson. Doubtless our young poet, when he was playing as a boy in the garden, and wanted his sister to come and have a game of lawn tennis, occasionally yelled through the window, “Come into the garden, Maud”, because that was a very common catchword of that period. (Of course I don’t mean to imply that his sister’s name really was Maud.) For by that time a catchword was all that it was. No trace was left by then of the — I may almost call it strong wave of emotion, mingled with controversy, which flooded the literary world on the appearance, in 1855, of Maud — not for the story, which is naught, nor for the philosophy, which is, if I may say so, naught-er, but for its wonderful singing lyrics—” O let the solid ground “Birds in the high Hall-garden”, “Go not, happy day”, “O that ‘twere possible” and, above all, “Come into the garden, Maud”, which the best critics of the time hailed as a perfect specimen of a flawless lyric, capable of standing the severest test that meticulous criticism could apply. And indeed it would be difficult to suggest alteration, substitution, elision, or change of a syllable in this passionate yet most restrained lyric. What recollections it brings back, even to quote a line or two of it:
‘“All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon,
All night has the casement jessamine stor’d
To the dancers dancing in tune,
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
And a hush with the setting moon.”
But fine as the sheer quality of this poem is, its contemporary appeal was, by all accounts, transcendent. This is the second time to-day that I have had to produce Tennyson as a witness, and this is not because I am specially addicted to Tennyson above other poets, but because Tennyson, in a quite remarkable way, gave voice to the thought and feeling of his own period, to an extent, I believe, never known in any other English poet. I should like to read you a short passage which I came across lately, in Mackail’s Life of William Morris, illustrating this. It is a quotation from some reminiscences written, some thirty years later, by a man who was an undergraduate at Oxford in 1855:
‘“It is difficult for the present generation to understand the Tennysonian enthusiasm which then prevailed both in Oxford and the world. All reading men were Tennysonians; all sets of reading men talked Poetry. Poetry was the thing; and it was felt with justice that this was due to Tennyson. Tennyson had invented a new Poetry, a new poetic English; his use of words was new, and every piece that he wrote was a conquest of a new region. This lasted till ‘Maud’, in 1855, which was his last poem that mattered. I am told that in this generation no University man cares for poetry. This is almost inconceivable to one who remembers Tennyson’s reign and his reception in the Sheldonian in’55. There was the general conviction that Tennyson was the greatest poet of the century, some held him the greatest of all poets, or at least of all modern poets.
I would add that we all had the feeling that after him no further development was possible, that we were at the end of all things in poetry.”
‘There the quotation ends. But I want you to notice that last sentence. Many years ago, I found myself sitting at dinner, or rather at the close of dinner, next to Francis Turner Palgrave, the poet better remembered as the compiler of the well-known anthology, The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, perhaps the best-known and most popular anthology of English verse. And I remember his turning to me and saying: “Now, you are a good deal younger than I am, and I want you to tell me, is there any real merit at all in any of these new writers whose names I hear so frequently, there is a young man called Stevenson, for instance, and another called Kipling. Is there really any lasting worth in what they write, or are they just the fleeting fashion of the day?” Well, I did my best to give him a resume of the qualities of these two writers, and I ventured to suggest that, if he could spare an hour or two, some evening, to the works of either or both of them, I thought he would not find his time had been wasted. He only shook his head rather sadly, “My interest in English Literature,” he said, “stopped short at Tennyson. He was to me the culminating point, and I didn’t care somehow to go on any further. I have never read the later writers.” You will find the same sort of idea — this idea of the finality of Tennyson — in books such as Edward FitzGerald’s letters, and in various Memoirs and Reminiscences by famous men who were contemporary with Tennyson or slightly older. They all wanted to stop there. They didn’t want any more, they didn’t, indeed, see how there could be any more. Now by this time I think we may consider Tennyson to be pretty fairly ranked and placed. However high his merit, he is not Shakespeare and he is not Dante. But when a poet can make so tremendous an appeal as that to his own age, surely he is entitled to some special good marks for that thing alone, in addition to the marks he earns for intrinsic merit. And these men, who held Tennyson so high, were no fools. Brilliant men, nearly all of them, and just as good critics as those of the present day. But really to attempt to justify the taste of the Mid-Victorians is considered to-day to be an offence in itself, just because they wore side-whiskers and crinolines, I should say, of course, side-whiskers or crinolines, because naturally they didn’t wear both at the same time. But I dare not say more on this subject, as, although I wear neither, I am a Mid-Victorian myself.
‘I may, however, just add that I am frankly puzzled by this special claim to finality, put forward by Tennyson’s contemporaries on his behalf. I don’t remember it being made in the case of any other poet. When Wordsworth, for instance, had somewhat slowly succeeded in getting his merit recognized for what it was, you never find the little band of enthusiasts who had championed his cause from the first, claiming that they did not want, or, indeed, expect, any further progress in English poetry. When Byron, again, took the literary world by storm in a day, when Johnson dominated it for years, when Pope was hailed, by his contemporaries, as easily the leading expression of contemporary taste in verse, or, to go further back if you like, to Shakespeare and even to Chaucer, who stood almost alone in his time, still you never find any of the special backers of these poets proclaiming that they never wanted anything better, and, what’s more, wouldn’t read it if they got it. I say again I frankly can give no explanation of it. Is it possible that there was more than a touch of self-complacency in the composition of the Mid-Victorian — self-righteousness, as we should call it in another connexion? Or is an even simpler explanation the right one, namely that they were suffering from satiety, from a sense of Repletion?
‘In this connexion, I am reminded of something I once read about George Eliot in her later years. An acquaintance told her that he proposed to bring so-and-so to call on her the following Sunday, adding, “a very interesting person, whom you will be glad to include in the number of your friends George Eliot, however, did not seem to be enthusiastic at the prospect before her, and merely observed plaintively, “Don’t you think that we have most of us got enough friends?” And I remember how that esteemed writer and gentle spirit, Walter Pater, having, in
the kindness of his heart, undertaken to dine with an undergraduate at his lodgings, felt it his duty to admire warmly everything that the lodging-housekeeper’s taste thought most fitting in decoration — the oleographs on the walls, the repp curtains, the veneered walnut furniture and so on. This continued till the end of the meal, when the dessert was placed on the table in a service of more than usual Mid-Victorian atrocity. Pater was heard to murmur, “Pretty plates, pretty plates — only they must not make any more.” Perhaps then the Mid-Victorians were merely thinking that, for the time, they had had enough poets, that Nature mustn’t make any more, that they wanted a rest; for there certainly were a lot of poets knocking about, in those palmy days.
‘For instance, among many others, there was Robert Browning, who, in that same year, 1855, published his Men and Women in which some of his most famous work appeared. But I am dragging Browning in here, in order to be able to remark, that there never was a great English poet who had less of that quality which I am calling the contemporary appeal than Browning. As Browning’s thoughts were peculiarly his own, so was his language; and really it was not till his admirers, very sensibly, formed a Society to, so to speak, unload Browning stock on the market, that he could be said to have got a real public hearing. The experiment was entirely successful. The public always like a Prospectus with a good list of Directors; and Browning was thenceforward accepted as a recognized National Poet. Now it is interesting to note, unless I am quite wrong, that since the time I speak of (the Browning Society was founded in 1881) Browning’s position with the British Public has hardly changed at all. As soon as they eventually placed him at all they placed him high, and he remains at the same level. Had he possessed more of that quality of the contemporary appeal, he would certainly have been ranked higher in the forties and fifties, and if we hold that it is a poet’s business to appeal to his own generation first, and future generations afterwards, we shall reluctantly have to refuse to Browning those special extra marks which we are allotting to-day. George Meredith was in much the same boat as Browning, intensely individual (I am speaking here of Meredith the poet), thinking his own thoughts and expressing them in a special language of his own that he was determined to use and no other, he was like a man writing for his own private enjoyment only, and he was never in close enough contact with his contemporaries (except a few of them of course) to evoke that answering thrill. But, I can hear you say, do not these two instances go to shatter your own argument? For if you admit, as no doubt you will, that both Browning and Meredith at their best reached a higher level than Tennyson, and yet never gained that contact with their contemporaries that you seem to value so much, doesn’t it amount to this, that your “appeal”, your “thrill”, is merely popularity — popularity, the cheapest thing on earth, the thing most unworthy of notice or regard on the part of any serious writer? Now in my reply I would ask you to observe, that in the few instances I have taken as illustrations of my theme, I have confined myself to writers of such assured and acknowledged position in the world of letters as to make them independent of mere popularity, even if they possessed it. There were scores and scores of other writers, men of fame in their day, whom I could have quoted as instances of intense contemporary popularity, if that had been what I was after, writers, too, actually more “popular” in their day than the great men I have quoted. Indeed, of these last, Scott was perhaps the only one who was really “popular” in the widest sense. He was read by high and low, educated and ignorant alike. Johnson, as a writer, was only “popular”, naturally, among educated people, and as for Tennyson, why, he never, in spite of “The May Queen” and “Locksley Hall”, achieved a tenth part of the “popularity” of Longfellow. No, popularity is not the same thing. Moore was a good example of a popular poet. A writer of verse always melodious and refined, free of the slightest trace of subtlety or profundity of thought, a man personally popular in himself, knowing everybody worth knowing and going everywhere, the darling of the humblest parlour that could run to a cottage piano on account of his Irish Melodies, he was popularity embodied. Nor is vogue. Vogue differs from popularity in that vogue always contains some hint of fashion. One reads so-and-so because the best people all read him. It’s the thing to do, that’s vogue. Samuel Rogers was the great instance of vogue in the last century. Rogers was rich; Rogers entertained; and Rogers wrote of his travels in Italy, and the Grand Tour in Italy was still the fashionable thing and he could afford to have them illustrated by Turner.
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 102