by Paul Hazard
Everybody alike, the English no less than the French, made prose their medium for the communication of ideas, and, with them, it became a weapon, challenging and aggressive. Essays, letters, dialogues of the dead and living, imaginative travel-tales—all became the repositories of their moral and religious ideas, of their philosophy.
Poets, however, they were not. To the rich music, the soothing caress that may be born of words, they were wholly insensitive, and all sense of mystery had vanished from their souls. They floodlit the world with the pitiless glare of realism, and they took care that even their most unpremeditated effusions should lack neither clarity of meaning, nor symmetry of form. If poetry is prayer, they never prayed; if it is a reaching out towards the ineffable, they would not hear of the ineffable; if it is to hesitate on the delicate line betwixt music and meaning; they never hesitated; no, not they! They aimed at being just so many proofs and theorems. When they did write verse, it was merely a vehicle for their ideas on geometry.[1]
And so poetry died; or at least seemed to die. Strictly logical and matter-of-fact, machine-made, sapless, it lost sight of its true mission. Versifiers there were in plenty in those days, but, after La Fontaine had gone, no more poets in France. And when the marvellous efflorescence of the classical school burst forth in England, it was the true poets that were the hardest to discover.
Then, the creative spirit met with another balk, and that, paradoxical as it sounds, was the excessive admiration paid to the masterpieces which the preceding age had produced in such profusion. Men like Corneille, Racine, Molière, had too many friends, too many disciples. These great men, it was considered, had for ever to be imitated, for ever to be copied. They were regarded as having made use of some sort of secret formula, or technical device, and it was held that if this was mastered and put to account, that was all that was needed to produce works of unfading beauty, just like theirs. Those bold intellects whose boast it was that they stood in awe of nothing and nobody, the sworn enemies of prejudice and superstition, turned out, when it came to literature, to be as mild as sheep. They bowed down to the idols, they regarded as sacrosanct the law of the three unities, and the distinction of genres. They refused to believe in demons or angels, but they did believe in Pindar and Anacreon and Theocritus, interpreted according to their own ideas. They even believed in Aristotle; not, indeed, in the philosopher, but in the author of the Poetics, regarding him, in that capacity, as nothing short of a demigod.
For such a one as Racine, Greece was a heart-moving poetic reality, Phèdre would have suffered less grievously had she not been a child of the gods:
J’ai pour ayeul le Père et le Maître des Dieux.
Le Ciel, tout l’Univers, est plein de mes ayeux.
Où me cacher? Fuyons dans la Nuit infernale.
Mais que dis-je? Mon père y tient l’urne fatale.
Le Sort, dit-on, l’a mise en ses sèvères mains.
Minos juge aux enfers tous les pâles humains.
Ah! combien frémira son ombre épouvantée,
Lorsqu’il verra sa fille à ses yeux présentée,
Contrainte d’avouer mille forfaits divers
Et des crimes peut-être inconnus aux Enfers?
Que diras-tu, mon Père, à ce spectacle horrible?[2]
But this very triumph of hers procured her own undoing, and Greece, thus misconstrued, ere long was Greece no more. Her spontaneity, her bloom, her very life—all these she lost, and came to resemble a burial-ground peopled only with statues. Her great original works of genius had dwindled to mere products of a code of rules, masterpieces manufactured according to plan. Greece was brought up to date. Instead of setting themselves to study the characters of Ajax or Ulysses, they applauded them, thought them fine fellows, because they wore a wig and sported a small-sword.
When, somewhat about 1715, Homer was exalted to the skies and the Ancients thought to be revenged upon the Moderns; when Pope brought out his Iliad with a preface that was rendered into French and German, what exactly was it that people saw in the Greek epic? Homer, his happy translator declared, had more invention than any other writer whatever. Invention it is that supplies Art with all her materials, for Art is like a prudent steward that lives on managing the riches of Nature. Homer, thanks to this faculty, was able to devise those fables which Aristotle calls the soul of epic poetry and which may be divided into three classes: the probable; the allegorical, which enable the poet to wrap up the secrets of nature and physical philosophy; the marvellous, which includes whatever is supernatural, and especially the machines of the gods. “Homer seems to have been the first who brought the gods into a system of machinery for poetry, and that is what gives it its greatest importance and dignity.” This invention, useful as it is in speeches, descriptions, images, similes, as well as in style and versification, is not without its drawbacks; its marvels come to lack verisimilitude, its metaphors are exaggerated and its repetitions wearisome. . . .
When she read those words, the impetuous Mme. Dacier scarcely knew how to contain herself. What does he say, this English person who has translated Homer, and doesn’t understand him in the least? According to him, the Iliad is “a wild paradise of beauties without order or symmetry, a place where only seeds are to be found, but nothing that has reached perfection or maturity, a work overladen with much superfluous growth which ought to be cut away, and which stifles or deforms the things which are worth preserving. Even the enemies of Homer never said anything more mischievous or more unjust. So far from the Iliad being an untended wilderness, it is the best laid out and most symmetrical garden that ever was. M. Le. Nostre, who led the world in his particular art, never achieved a more consummate regularity in his gardens than did Homer in his poetry.”
Those words mark the final stage of the down-slide: Ithaca has become Versailles!
Poetry—how cruelly it was mishandled! No one any longer knew the meaning of the word. No more now did those airs from heaven steal softly over the heart. Poetry was fast coming to be looked on as a branch of rhetoric; which was its worst foe. Instead of searching the depths of the soul, it was content, in a manner quite contrary to its real nature, to look at things from the outside, insisting on arguing, proving and concluding. The imagination was looked on as one of the lower faculties; poetic images, carefully filed and indexed, were so much tinsel frippery. Versification, monotonous and hollow, merely showed how skilfully the craftsman could mould his material. That is what poetry had come to. As Valincourt said in reply to the speech in which M. de Fleury welcomed him to membership of the Academy in 1717, the Muses had forsaken Parnassus, they were divinities no longer, they were but divers manifestations of the expedient Reason had always employed to find a way into the mind of man.
To get a just idea of the distance such aberrations could lead people in those days, we should read again what Fontenelle said about the Eclogue, and Houdar de la Motte about the Ode. The latter was the more logical of the two, for he had the courage of his opinions, and followed fearlessly whithersoever his principles led him: verse he said is a hindrance, an encumbrance; we should keep to prose. Prose is quite able to express anything you can say in verse; it is more precise, more to the point, and it takes less time. You do not have to rack your brains to discover rhymes, or to make your verses scan. Let us take a new line and give the public odes in prose instead of verse. . . . Do not imagine, however, that what he had in mind was anything in the nature of vers libre, or the idea that inspiration is entitled to create its form of expression according to its own good pleasure. Vers libre! No, he was a long way from that. Harmony, he said, was of no importance; and he gloried in the statement.
If, throughout its history, poetry has always had a deadly foe in rhetoric, there is no denying that rhetoric never scored a greater or more ruthless victory than when Houdar de la Motte composed that ode of his called La libre éloquence, on the theme, “Away with rhyme and metre!”
Rhyme, as fantastical as thou art imperious! Metre, thou
tyrant! Shall my thoughts always remain your bond-slaves? How much longer will ye withhold from them the empire of the mind, their birthright? At the bidding of scansion and rhythm, accuracy, precision, clarity must needs be sacrificed upon your altars. Or, if I strive to retain them in spite of you, what tortures you inflict on me, in punishment for my resistance! Thou alone, O Eloquence free and independent, thou alone canst set me free from a bondage so inimical to Reason.
This Houdar de la Motte was the man who re-moulded the Iliad, cut it down to a dozen cantos, and then composed an ode in which the Bard himself is depicted as congratulating him on his good work; he it was who turned whole scenes from Racine into prose, and rubbed his hands with gleeful satisfaction. His friends and fellow-sympathizers looked forward to the day when everyone would recognize that a clear presentment of the facts was the only thing that mattered, and when these figures of speech, these figments of the imagination, would be abandoned in favour of the plain unvarnished truth; when language would no more be tortured and twisted just to titillate the ear; when poets would become philosophers; and what better use could they be put to![3] “The more perfect the reasoning faculty becomes, the more will judgment take precedence over imagination, and the less, in consequence, will poets be held in honour. The earliest writers, we are told, were poets. That I can well believe; they could not very well have been anything else. But the latest will be philosophers.”[4]
But until that day, as yet far-off, arrived, a wary eye must be kept on the useless, persistent and deceitful tribe. Jean Le Clerc defines a poet as one who invents, in whole or in part, whatever he chooses for his theme, who puts his ideas in a way best calculated to cause surprise in the reader, so as to sustain his attention, and who employs a phraseology very unlike the ordinary, not only in the way he arranges his words, but in his choice of the words themselves. “When you begin reading a piece of poetry, remember you are reading the work of a purveyor of lies, whose aim it is to feed us on chimaeras, or on truths so twisted and distorted that we are hard put to it to disentangle fact from fiction. We must always bear in mind that the resounding phrases he employs are intended to bemuse our judgment, and that his mellifluous cadences are designed so to charm our ears as to attract us to the theme, and give us an exalted notion of the writer. If we remember this, we shall have an antidote to writings of this kind, not that they too may not have their advantages for strong-minded people, however misleading they may be for those whose tendency to be carried away by their feelings is not balanced by a sound judgment.”[5] Whence comes this hostility on the part of one of the most representative of the rationalists? It comes from the conviction, firmly implanted, that poetry is just another name for falsehood. And, after all, that was the view held, albeit unconsciously, by the great majority of people in those days. The great thing, they thought, was to produce odes like Pindar’s, or like the Ode on the Fall of Namur, which was for them a particularly unfortunate model. “It has always been my belief”, said Jean Baptiste Rousseau, who was regarded as the foremost lyric poet of his time, “that one of the surest ways of attaining the sublime is to imitate the illustrious writers who have preceded us.” So sublimity for him meant a shower of notes of interrogation, or exclamation, and simulated emotional transports. He will start by referring to some wonderful, some unspeakably marvellous thing that has happened. What is this I see before me? What is this I hear? Why are the heavens thus riven asunder? The reason is that some princess or other is about to be married, some prince has been born, or some king has died. Then come some strophes, tricked out with a brave display of mythological trappings, with a simile, a purple patch, a vivid touch of some kind to finish up with. And there you have it, the ode, the finished article; yet not quite perfect, unless its logical structure, its mechanism, is concealed by a studiously calculated artlessness. “This artlessness has its rules, its method; it is indeed an art in itself, and the more this artlessness conceals the framework of the thing the better; just as our conversation flows on more naturally when a sort of intellectual intoxication keeps it from languishing: The fact of the matter is that this so-called artlessness is really wisdom masquerading as folly, and disencumbered of the geometrical shackles that weigh it down and take the life out of it.”[6]
One could, at a pinch, adduce a few extenuating circumstances. In the ledger containing the profit-and-loss account, there are a few items to be put on the credit side, against all the things written off as gone with the wind.
People who talk about poésie pure, “absolute” poetry, are simply dreaming: there is no such thing; but only relative poetry; relative, that is to say, to each successive age. For poetry to keep alive, it suffices that the age, given over though it be to “abstract reasoning”, should yet find a certain charm in what it is pleased to call “a false deceiver”; it suffices that, however inconsistently with its theories, it should refuse to concur with a man who, in the plainest terms, would reduce verse to the level of prose, it suffices that for poetry to be kept alive there should still be left a few practitioners of the art capable of imparting to their work, however feebly, some faint and far-off echo of a loftier harmony. Poésie pure, there is not; but there is an everlasting craving for poetry. Pope seemed a poet of genius, and such he was. He satisfied, and more than satisfied, the modest demand of his generation. Therefore it would not be wholly beside the mark to say that, even in this arid age, there was, for those who lived in it, such a thing as poetry. For the Germans, Canitz was a poet; and not only for the Germans, but for the French as well, since, later on, he was included among the models brought to their notice to show them how simple and natural the Germans could be. The Italians offered a whole tribe of poets for Europe to admire; and the extraordinary thing was that, despite all the causes they had to write ill, they wrote some things which lived for more than a day, more than a year, ay, and more than a century, things that still retain a charm for us today. They were fettered by the traditions of Marini and his school, which led them to sing of things like frozen fire, of scorching ice, of cruel kindness, of sweet asperity and the like; still more were they burdened by memories and echoes of the classic past. Whenever they did not think it their duty to copy Anacreon, they did their best to copy Pindar. Nor was that all; there was another encumbrance, and that was Science, a newcomer, which they took to their bosoms and must needs drag into their poetry at all costs. Overloaded with high-sounding words, trying to display that engaging artlessness which is born of the highest art, their odes, for all that, were laboured and ponderous. But one fine day, aping Pindar though he was, it occurred to Francesco Redi to invite Bacchus to visit the Tuscan hills, there to regale him with, one after another, the famous vintages yielded by their fertile vineyards, and then to portray him staggering, stammering, getting more and more fuddled till at last he was reeling ripe:
Chi la squallida cergovia
Alle labbra sue congiugne,
Presto muore, o rado giugne
All’età vecchia e barbogia:
Beva il sidro d’Inghilterra
Chi vuol gir presto sotterra:
Chi vuol gir presto alla morte,
Le bevande usi del Norte . . .
By merely uttering the names of those unholy beverages, Bacchus has spoken blasphemy; needs must his erring lips
Si purifichi, s’immerga,
Si sommerga
Dentro un pecchero indorato,
Colmo in giro di quel vino
Del vitigno
Si benigno
Che fiammeggia in Sansovino.[7]
That day a poetry, with plenty of “body” in it, rich in savour, original despite its pretence of echoing the dithyrambs of ancient days, was garnered in. And one day, Vincenzo da Filicaja, lamenting his country’s servitude gave utterance to his grief in melodious and moving plaints:
E t’armi, o Francia? e stringi il ferro ignudo
Contra a me, che a tuoi colpi armi ho vi vetro,
Nè a me la gloria de l’antico scetro,
>
Nè l’antica grandezza a me fa scudo?[8]
But now, enough of this sort of thing; enough of quaint conceits, of absurdly exaggerated metaphors, of affected figures of speech, complicated, refined upon, twisted and tortured—enough of all this! The Italians would banish the secentismo, and all its trappings, from their poetry. They are up in arms against it all. No more, for them, of these poetical high-flights! Give us simplicity, they cried. Nature plain and unadorned. The house is cluttered up with knick-knacks. We must have a thorough turn-out, make a clean sweep of the place. But what am I saying? The house, the house itself is not wanted. No more walls! No more roofs! What real poetry needs is the open-air. At Rome, in 1690, poets and sages met together. It was decided that they should hold their future meetings in the woodlands, under the open sky. They would fain bring back the days of ancient Arcady, when men breathed poetry in the wind’s soft sighs, when shepherds wooed celestial airs from their rustic pipes. An alluring idea, but when they tried to put it into effect, it all turned out to be just make-believe and masquerade. These Arcadians draw up a code of rules for themselves; that was their first concern; they called themselves by the names of Greek shepherds; there were whole colonies of them all over Italy. They were more anxious about being “correct” in all the details than Roman Arcady itself. Their rustic groves echoed to verses just as indifferent as those they were so eager to banish. They were, indeed, the very same. They had had them stowed away in albums, and now they brought them forth again, not a whit changed. The enterprise ended in failure. It is the failure that is usually emphasized; yet something might be said about the beauty, the nobility of the enterprise.
There were some gleanings, too, to be gathered from English fields. Prior may not give you broad frescoes and vivid colouring, nevertheless, in his dainty little sketches, he portrays the picturesque with charm. Not his the swelling tones of great symphonies; yet he sings sweetly and melodiously, and, if the studied graces he got from the Greeks and the Romans sat on him with the ease of a second nature, they did not wholly overlay the original beneath. Anacreon and his beloved Horace lent a polish to his talent; they did not create it. There is an undeniable grace about his numbers as he sings the charms of quiet leisure, the trials of life, our dread of mortality, the flight of time, Chloe in tears because her flowers have withered. Not his the tones of anger, scorn, or gnawing grief; yet, ever and anon, there steals into his song a note of sadness that stirs a deeper echo in our hearts. Matthew is travelling in old England with his friend, John. He comes to an inn which he had known long ago: