Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  That above these nether things

  I may rise to where thou art, –

  I may flutter next thine heart!

  For if a light within me burn,

  It must be darkness in an urn,

  Unless within its crystalline,

  That unbeginning light of thine

  Shine! – oh! Saviour, let it shine!

  He is the last of our Greeks. The light from Troy city, with which all Greek glory began, “threw three times six,” said Æschylus, that man with a soul, – beacon after beacon, into the heart of Greece. “Three times six,” too, threw the light from Greece, when her own heart-light had gone out like Troy’s, onward along the ridges of time. Three times six – but what faint beacons are the last! – sometimes only a red brand; sometimes only a small trembling flame; sometimes only a white glimmer, as of ashes breathed on by the wind; faint beacons and far! How far! We have watched them along the cloudy tops of the great centuries, through the ages dark but for them, – and now stand looking with eyes of farewell upon the last pale sign on the last mist-bound hill. But it is the sixteenth century. Beyond the ashes on the hill a red light is gathering – above the falling of the dews a great sun is rising: there is a rushing of life and song upward; let it still be UPWARD! – Shakspeare is in the world! And the Genius of English Poetry, she who only of all the earth is worthy, (Goethe’s spirit may hear us say so, and smile,) stooping, with a royal gesture, to kiss the dead lips of the Genius of Greece, stands up her successor in the universe, by virtue of that chrism, and in right of her own crown.

  The Book of the Poets

  First published in The Athenæum, 1842

  CONTENTS

  PART I.

  PART II.

  PART III.

  PART IV.

  CONCLUSION.

  PART I.

  THE voice of the turtle is heard in the land. The green book of the earth is open, and the four winds are turning the leaves, – while Nature, chief secretary to the creative Word, sits busy at her inditing of many a love poem, – her ‘Flower and the Leaf,’ on this side, her ‘Cuckoo and the Nightingale’ on that; her ‘Paradise of Dainty Devices’ in and out among the valleys, her ‘Polyolbion’ away across the hills, her ‘Britannia’s Pastorals’ on the home meadows, her sonnets of tufted primroses, her lyrical outgushings of May blossoming, her epical and didactic solemnities of light and shadow, – and many an illustrative picture to garnish the universal annual. What book shall we open side by side with Nature’s? First, the book of God. ‘The Book of the Poets’ may well come next – even this book, if it deserves indeed the nobility of its name.

  But this book, which is not Campbell’s Selection from the British Poets, nor Southey’s, nor different from either by being better, resembles many others of the nobly named, whether princes or hereditary legislators, in bearing a name too noble for its desert. This book, consisting of short extracts from the books of the poets, beginning with Chaucer, ending with Beattie, and missing sundry by the way, – we call it indefinitely ‘A book of the poets,’ and leave it thankful. The extracts from Chaucer are topsy-turvy – one from the Canterbury Tales prologue thrown in between two from the Knight’s tale; while Gower may blame “his fortune” –

  (And some men hold opinion

  That it is constellation,)

  for the dry specimen crumbled off from his man-mountainism. Of Lydgate there is scarcely a page; of Occleve, Hawes, and Skelton – the two last especially interesting in poetical history, – of Sackville, and the whole generation of dramatists, not a word. “The table is not full,” and the ringing on it of Phillips’s ‘Splendid Shilling,’ will not bribe us to endurance. What! place for Pomfret’s platitudes, and no place for Shakspeare’s divine sonnets? and no place for Jonson’s and Fletcher’s lyrics? Do lyrics and sonnets perish out of place whenever their poets make tragedies too, quenched by the entity of tragedy? We suggest that Shakspeare has nearly as much claim to place in any possible book of the poets (though also a book of the poetasters) as ever can have John Hughes, who “as a poet, is chiefly known,” saith the critical editor, “by his tragedy of the ‘Siege of Damascus.’” Let this book therefore accept our boon, and remain a book of the poets, thankfully if not gloriously, – while we, on our own side, may be thankful too, that in the present days of the millennium of Jeremy Bentham, a more literally golden age than the laureates of Saturnus dreamed withal, – any memory of the poets should linger with the booksellers, and come “up this way” with the spring. The thing is good, in that it is at all. Send a little child into a garden, and he will be sure to bring you a nosegay worth having, though the red weed in it should “side the lily,” and sundry of the prettiest flowers be held stalk upwards. Flowers are flowers and poets are poets, and “A book of the poets” must be right welcome at every hour of the clock. For the preliminary essay, which is very moderately well done, we embrace it, with our fingers at least, in taking up the volume. It pleases us better on the solitary point of the devotional poets than Mr. Campbell’s beautiful treatise, doing, as it seems to us, more frank justice to the Withers’s, the Quarles’s, and the Crashaws. Otherwise the criticism and philosophy to be found in it are scarcely of the happiest, – although even the first astonishing paragraph which justifies the utility of poetry on the ground of its being an attractive variety of language, a persuasive medium for abstract ideas, (as reasonable were the justification of a seraph’s essence deduced from the cloud beneath his foot!) shall not provoke us back to discontent from the vision of the poets of England, suggested by the title of this ‘Book,’ and stretching along gloriously to our survey.

  Our poetry has an heroic genealogy. It arose where the sun rises, in the far East. It came out from Arabia, and was tilted on the lance-heads of the Saracens into the heart of Europe, Armorica catching it in rebound from Spain, and England from Armorica. It issued in its first breath from Georgia, wrapt in the gathering cry of Persian Odin: and passing from the orient of the sun to the antagonistic snows of Iceland, and oversweeping the black pines of Germany and the jutting shores of Scandinavia, and embodying in itself all way-side sounds, even to the rude shouts of the brazen-throated Cimbri, – so modified, multiplied, resonant in a thousand Runic echoes, it rushed abroad like a blast into Britain. In Britain, the Arabic Saracenic Armorican, and the Georgian Gothic Scandinavian mixed sound at last; and the dying suspirations of the Grecian and Latin literatures, the last low stir of the “Gesta Romanorum,” with the apocryphal personations of lost authentic voices, breathed up together through the fissures of the rent universe to help the new intonation and accomplish the cadence. Genius was thrust onward to a new slope of the world. And soon, when simpler minstrels had sate there long enough to tune the ear of time, – when Layamon and his successors had hummed long enough, like wild bees, upon the lips of our infant poetry predestined to eloquence, – then Robert Langlande, the monk, walking for cloister “by a wode’s syde” on the Malvern hills, took counsel with his holy “Plowman,” and sang of other visions than their highest ridge can show. While we write, the woods upon those beautiful hills are obsolete, even as Langlande’s verses; scarcely a shrub grows upon the hills! but it is well for the thinkers of England to remember reverently, while taking thought of her poetry they stand among the gorse, – that if we may boast now of more honoured localities, of Shakspeare’s “rocky Avon,” and Spenser’s “soft-streaming Thames,” and Wordsworth’s “Rydal Mere,” still our first holy poet-ground is there.

  But it is in Chaucer we touch the true height, and look abroad into the kingdoms and glories of our poetical literature, – it is with Chaucer that we begin our ‘Books of the Poets,’ our collections and selections, our pride of place and name. And the genius of the poet shares the character of his position: he was made for an early poet, and the metaphors of dawn and spring doubly become him. A morning-star, a lark’s exultation, cannot usher in a glory better. The “cheerful morning face,” “the breezy call of incense-breathing
morn,” you recognize in his countenance and voice: it is a voice full of promise and prophecy. He is the good omen of our poetry, the “good bird,” according to the Romans, “the best good angel of the spring,” the nightingale, according to his own creed of good luck, heard before the cuckoo.

  Up rose the sunne, and uprose Emilie,

  and uprose her poet, the first of a line of kings, conscious of futurity in his smile. He is a king and inherits the earth, and expands his great soul smilingly to embrace his great heritage. Nothing is too high for him to touch with a thought, nothing too low to dower with an affection. As a complete creature cognate of life and death, he cries upon God, – as a sympathetic creature he singles out a daisy from the universe (“si douce est la marguerite,”) to lie down by half a summer’s day and bless it for fellowship. His senses are open and delicate, like a young child’s – his sensibilities capacious of supersensual relations, like an experienced thinker’s. Child-like, too, his tears and smiles lie at the edge of his eyes, and he is one proof more among the many, that the deepest pathos and the quickest gaieties hide together in the same nature. He is too wakeful and curious to lose the stirring of a leaf, yet not too wide awake to see visions of green and white ladies between the branches; and a fair house of fame and a noble court of love are built and holden in the winking of his eyelash. And because his imagination is neither too “high fantastical” to refuse proudly the gravitation of the earth, nor too “light of love” to lose it carelessly, he can create as well as dream, and work with clay as well as cloud, – and when his men and women stand close by the actual ones, your stop-watch shall reckon no difference in the beating of their hearts. He knew the secret of nature and art, – that truth is beauty, – and saying “I will make ‘A Wife of Bath’ as well as Emilie, and you shall remember her as long,” we do remember her as long. And he sent us a train of pilgrims, each with a distinct individuality apart from the pilgrimage, all the way from Southwark and the Tabard Inn, to Canterbury and Becket’s shrine: and their laughter comes never to an end, and their talk goes on with the stars, and all the railroads which may intersect the spoilt earth for ever, cannot hush the “tramp, tramp” of their horses’ feet.

  Controversy is provocative. We cannot help observing, because certain critics observe otherwise, that Chaucer utters as true music as ever came from poet or musician; that some of the sweetest cadences in all our English are extant in his – “swete upon his tongue” in completest modulation. Let “Denham’s strength, and Waller’s sweetness join” the Io pæan of a later age, the “eurekamen” of Pope and his generation. Not one of the “Queen Anne’s men,” measuring out a tuneful breath upon their fingers, like ribbons for topknots, did know the art of versification as the old rude Chaucer knew it. Call him rude for the picturesqueness of the epithet; but his verse has, at least, as much regularity in the sense of true art, and more manifestly in proportion to our increasing acquaintance with his dialect and pronunciation, as can be discovered or dreamed in the French school. Critics indeed have set up a system based upon the crushed atoms of first principles, maintaining that poor Chaucer wrote by accent only! Grant to them that he counted no verses on his fingers; grant that he never disciplined his highest thoughts to walk up and down in a paddock – ten paces and a turn; grant that his singing is not after the likeness of their singsong – but there end your admissions. It is our ineffaceable impression, in fact, that the whole theory of accent and quantity held in relation to ancient and modern poetry stands upon a fallacy, totters rather than stands; and that when considered in connexion with such old moderns as our Chaucer, the fallaciousness is especially apparent. Chaucer wrote by quantity, just as Homer did before him, just as Goethe did after him, just as all poets must. Rules differ, principles are identical. All rhythm presupposes quantity. Organ-pipe or harp, the musician plays by time. Greek or English, Chaucer or Pope, the poet sings by time. What is this accent but a stroke, an emphasis, with a successive pause to make complete the time? And what is the difference between this accent and quality but the difference between a harp-note and an organ-note? otherwise, quantity expressed in different ways? It is as easy for matter to subsist out of space, as music out of time.

  Side by side with Chaucer comes Gower, who is ungratefully disregarded too often, because side by side with Chaucer. He who rides in the king’s chariot will miss the people’s “hic est.” Could Gower be considered apart, there might be found signs in him of an independent royalty, however his fate may seem to lie in waiting for ever in his brother’s ante-chamber, like Napoleon’s tame kings. To speak our mind, he has been much undervalued. He is nailed to a comparative degree; and everybody seems to make it a condition of speaking of him, that something be called inferior within him, and something superior, out of him. He is laid down flat, as a dark background for “throwing out” Chaucer’s lights – he is used as που στω for leaping up into the empyrean of Chaucer’s praise. This is not just nor worthy. His principal poem, the ‘Confessio Amantis,’ preceded the ‘Canterbury Tales,’ and proves an abundant fancy, a full head and full heart, and neither ineloquent. We do not praise its design, – in which the father confessor is set up as a storyteller, like the bishop of Tricca, “avec l’ame,” like the cardinal de Retz, “la moins ecclesiastique du monde,” – while we admit that he tells his stories as if born to the manner of it, and that they are not much the graver, nor, peradventure, the holier either, for the circumstances of the confessorship. They are indeed told gracefully and pleasantly enough, and if with no superfluous life and gesture, with an active sense of beauty in some sort, and as flowing a rhythm as may bear comparison with many octosyllabics of our day; Chaucer himself having done more honour to their worth as stories than we can do in our praise, by adopting and crowning several of their number for king’s sons within his own palaces. And this recals that, at the opening of one glorious felony, the Man of Lawe’s tale, he has written, a little unlawfully and ungratefully considering the connexion, some lines of harsh significance upon poor Gower, – whence has been conjectured by the grey gossips of criticism, a literary jealousy, an unholy enmity, nothing less than a soul-chasm between the contemporary poets. We believe nothing of it; no, nor of the Shakspeare and Jonson feud after it.

  To alle such cursed stories we saie fy.

  That Chaucer wrote in irritation is clear: that he was angry seriously and lastingly, or beyond the pastime of passion spent in a verse as provoked by a verse, there appears to us no reason for crediting. But our idea of the nature of the irritation will expound itself in our idea of the offence, which is here in Dan Gower’s proper words, as extracted from Ladie Venus’s speech in the ‘Confessio Amantis.’

  And grete well Chaucer whan ye mete,

  As my disciple and poete! –

  * * * *

  Forthy now in his daies old,

  Thou shalt him telle this message,

  That he upon his latter age,

  To sette an ende of alle his werke

  As he who is mine owne clerke,

  Do make his testament of love.”

  We would not slander Chaucer’s temper, – we believe, on the contrary, that he had the sweetest temper in the world, – and still it is our conviction, none the weaker, that he was far from being entirely pleased by this “message.” We are sure he did not like the message, and not many poets would. His “elvish countenance” might well grow dark, and “his sugred mouth” speak somewhat sourly, in response to such a message. Decidedly, in our opinion, it was an impertinent message, a provocative message, a most inexcusable and odious message! Waxing hotter ourselves the longer we think of it, there is more excuse for Chaucer. For, consider, gentle reader! this indecorous message preceded the appearance of the Canterbury Tales, and proceeded from a rival poet in the act of completing his principal work, – its plain significance being “I have done my poem, and you cannot do yours because you are superannuated.” And this, while the great poet addressed, was looking forward farther than
the visible horizon, his eyes dilated with a mighty purpose. And to be counselled by this, to shut them forsooth, and take his crook and dog and place in the valleys like a grey shepherd of the Pyrenees – he, who felt his foot strong upon the heights! he, with no wrinkle on his forehead deep enough to touch the outermost of inward smooth dreams – he in the divine youth of his healthy soul, in the quenchless love of his embracing sympathies, in the untired working of his perpetual energies, – to “make an ende of alle his werke” and be told, as if he were not a poet! “Go to, O vain man,” – we do not reckon the age of the poet’s soul by the shadow on the dial! Enough that it falls upon his grave.

  Occleve and Lydgate both breathed the air of the world while Chaucer breathed it, although surviving him so long as rather to take standing as his successors than contemporaries. Both called him “master” with a faithful reverting tenderness, and, however we are bound to distinguish Lydgate as the higher poet of the two, Occleve’s ‘Alas’ may become the other’s lips –

  Alas, that thou thine excellent prudence

  In thy bed mortell mightest not bequeath!

  For alas! it was not bequeathed. Lydgate’s Thebaid, attached by its introduction to the ‘Canterbury Tales,’ gives or enforces the occasion for sighing comparisons with the master’s picturesque vivacity, while equally in delicacy and intenseness we admit no progress in the disciple. He does, in fact, appear to us so much overrated by the critics, that we are tempted to extend to his poetry his own admission on his monkish dress, –

  I wear a habit of perfection

  Although my life agree not with that same.

  and to opine concerning the praise and poetry taken together, that the latter agrees not with that same. An elegant poet – “poeta elegans” – was he called by the courteous Pits, – a questionable compliment in most cases, while the application in the particular one agrees not with that same. An improver of the language he is granted to be by all; and a voluminous writer of respectable faculties in his position, could scarcely help being so – he has flashes of genius, but they are not prolonged to the point of warming the soul, – can strike a bold note, but fails to hold it on, – attains to moments of power and pathos, but wears, for working days, no habit of perfection.