Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 1001
While we have had masses of learned work about the Shakespearean origins, we have had very little about the Shakespearean origin. I mean we have had very little on the main matter of his human and natural inheritance of the whole civilization of Christendom from which he came. It is a commonplace that Shakespeare was a result of the Renaissance; but the Renaissance itself was a result of the Middle Ages; nor was it by any means merely a revolt against the Middle Ages. There are a thousand things in which Shakespeare would be much better understood by Dante than he was by Goethe. I will take one example, all the stronger for being always taken the other way. English patriotism is one of the more manly realities of the modern world; and Shakespeare was a passionate patriot. But in that very passage in praise of England which is hackneyed without ceasing to be holy, about half is a medieval memory of the sort called a medieval superstition. It is not about the spacious days of Elizabeth, but the cloistered days of Peter the Hermit. It is not about the Armada but about the Crusades —
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son.
That note was neglected and nearly lost in the whole modern world; and scarcely any modern critic would have cared to notice it. Only the prodigious events of yesterday have brought us back, half-bewildered, into the footsteps of our fathers; and the vision of John of Gaunt was fulfilled in the hour when a great English soldier entered Jerusalem on foot.
A PLEA FOR THE HEROIC COUPLET
I SHOULD like to see a real poet write again in the heroic couplet of the didactic eighteenth century. Of course (it may be added) we should all like to see a real poet write anything, if he would only do it. But the couplet in question has been under-valued. We have got so used to considering it didactic that we forget that it could be heroic. When the Romantics raised their revolt against the school of Pope, they were probably justified in abandoning it; but they were not justified in representing it as merely neat, still less as merely mechanical. It did lend itself to mere neatness, to the epigram with the sting in the tail. But it was not fair to imply that it was like a Limerick, a thing that could have nothing but a neat ending — a creature that was all tail. It did lend itself to flippancy, as in lines like —
Die and endow a college or a cat.
It did lend itself to compact contradiction, in lines like —
And so obliging that he ne’er obliged.
But the notion that it had never done anything but this sort of thing is a fallacy left behind by a forgotten quarrel. Things were written in that restrained metre that have a real epic sublimity. They are not the less imaginative because they left much to the imagination. I use the word epic in the sense that an epic is a sort of gigantic gesture — as when the old French epic was called a Chanson de Geste. It is a deed rather than a word; its very words suggest something beyond them, like a blessing or a blow. Let anyone who can feel the wind and shadow of that mighty movement say whether he does not feel it unmistakably in certain moments of these great poets of the Age of Reason —
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to heaven the measure and the choice,
in which, to my fancy, the words ‘still raise’ seem to rise like a lifted hand; or those splendid prophecies of doom —
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made
not to mention that deep and indestructible truth for present and future —
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
These words do not deserve to be condemned as neat. They do not deserve to be despised as witty. We might as well call a speech of Satan or of Samson, as rendered by Milton, merely neat and witty because those who do not appreciate the classic might call it cold. The great gesture may seem to some to be rather that of an orator than an oracle of which the priestess writhes and foams at the mouth in a frenzy; but the same might be said of the speech in Milton. But, even while we agree that a warmer colour or a wilder imagery made more purely poetical the poets before and the poets after Pope, there is no reason why these elements should not enrich the heroic couplet as much as any other metre, or why that which was once used to express reason should not be used again to express imagination. I believe myself that it would be found to be a very full and even a very free form of diction, allowing of a great many good effects old and new, and none the worse if these included among other things the ringing conclusiveness of the printed statement, at once an epic and an epigram.
But whether or no the old form could be used for the highest moods of wisdom, one real advantage attached to it when used for the lower purpose of wit. It did not permit of mystification — nor, therefore, did it permit of mere bluff. There is such a thing as sham wisdom; but there cannot be any such thing as sham wit. There can be a bad pun or a good one; but we do so far see the point that we see the pun. There can be a bad joke or a good one; but we must see the joke even in judging it to be bad. There can be a poor epigram or a powerful one; but we know where to look for the sting, and it is still in the tail. Hence the brain has at least to be at work in some way in order to produce even the worst couplets of the old rationalistic poetry. The brain may be even more magnificently at work in Shelley or Coleridge than in Goldsmith or Pope. But it is much easier to be a sham Shelley than to be a sham Pope. If you want to rival or parody lines like ‘Damn with faint praise . . . and without sneering teach the rest to sneer’, you must endure for a few moments at least the abnormal agony of thinking. But you can affirm positively that a line you have just written, which runs ‘Maniac moonshine sways and staggers,’ is quite as good as the line, ‘The sanguine sunrise with its meteor eyes’ leaping on the back of the cloud, like a large glaring cat, in the lines of Shelley. There is, therefore, no check or limit to the production of purely imaginative poetry — a dark and disturbing thought. Men need only go on repeating that all poetry has been called nonsense, and deducing from this that all nonsense can be called poetry.
One of the thousand things which thinkers of this school never think of is this: that, even if it be true that the old poets were similarly criticized by the yet older critics, the wise man will by no means take it entirely for granted that the older critics were wrong. When we are told, ‘We heard the same old-fashioned outcry at the beginning of the Romantic movement,’ we shall take the liberty of answering ‘Yes; and we have not yet seen the end of the Romantic movement.’ If the Romantic movement ends in a mad-house, people will say there was a great deal to be said for those old family physicians, the original classical critics. To most of us, born in the intervening time, it would normally seem natural to prefer the romantic to the rationalistic. We find it difficult to believe that ‘Hernani’ must be a bad play if it violates the unities of time and place as observed in ‘Hecuba’. But if the next play we see preserves the unities by exhibiting as its first scene a section of the interior of the diseased brain of a dipsomaniac, a scene in which all the characters are maggots (or possibly snakes), we shall find our selves unable to deny that the violation of the unities has in fact led to the violation of the sanities. And if the author of this quiet little idyll of snakes and maggots turns on us scornfully and says, ‘The old critics told Victor Hugo the same sort of thing; they told him he was letting in a flood of folly and anarchy to drown the world,’ why, there will come upon us a very strong temptation to answer, ‘And apparently he was.’
Nevertheless, I do not feel bound to support the old classical critics. I only feel free to support them. That is exactly the difference; and a difference which cannot apparently be made clear to those who talk the cant of novelty. They tell me that they are not to be browbeaten by the established tyrannies of the past. I answer that neither am I to be browbeaten by the successful revolutions of the past. The innovator boasts that he is free to show how time has justified the rebel; but I hold my self equally free to speculate on how a little more time may justify the rebuke to the rebel. Indeed, the rebuke may be justified even when it is not just. I should heartily agree that Keats was a very great man and that Gifford was a very small man. But I might claim the right to defend a small man in the right against a great man in the wrong. The case of Keats is indeed unfair and unrepresentative, which is why it is always taken as typical. Gifford was not merely a small poet or critic; he was a paltry political hack with a personal spite, such as may exist in any age or any school. But if a classical critic said that Keats’ early work contained elements capable of dissolving the dignity and severity of poetry, was he wrong? I fancy the admirers of Keats who say so are rather admirers of Keats than readers of Keats. I doubt whether most of them have a habit of reading steadily through ‘Endymion’.
When we really welcome the next poet, I doubt whether he will be at all like our notion of the new poet. It may be questioned whether he will really cover the page with sprawling, irregular rhythms or leave it spotted with isolated words and images and symbols. It is quite likely that he will sit down and write in rhymed decasyllabics, or some other old form; and will observe all the old rules and preserve all the old unities — and say all he has to say and hardly know that he has done it.
TO PRAISE, EXALT, ESTABLISH, AND DEFEND
THERE is a big blank in the cleverest contemporary literature; and it is always difficult to draw a picture of a blank. Nobody finds it easy to define a negative, or to analyse the exact texture of a hole. But I can best begin by quoting certain lines of a friend of mine, not because he is a friend of mine, but because he does give a vivid description of what is not there. Mr Belloc, belonging to older traditions, wrote a Poem in Praise of Wine, of which the first two lines are these —
To praise, exalt, establish, and defend,
To welcome home mankind’s mysterious friend.
That is the note which, for some reason, has disappeared from most modern writing. There is any amount of sensibility to things, of subtle response to things, of delicate description of how the particular poet is affected by things; but he is never affected in this way. He will tell us that a pool with green scum on it partly depressed and partly delighted him; but he will not decide; he will not pronounce upon whether there ought to be any pond; or whether any pond ought to have any scum; or whether any scum ought to be green rather than peacock-blue; or whether, in short, he thanks God for a good green pond, or merely feels inclined to drown himself in it. And as is his aesthetic attitude towards the scum of the pond, so is his moral attitude towards the scum of the population.
He will tell us, to vary the figure, that the glimpse of a girl’s mocking face in a crowd left him disturbed and doubtful; but he will not say, as did the great poets of old, that it left him either despairing or resolved. Dante had very little more than a glimpse of Beatrice on this earth; but he instantly perpetuated it in a perspective as solid as architecture, stretching away into the corridors and halls of heaven. Some great poets in the past, when the girl’s mocking face was a little too mocking, hardened and fixed and fossilized the memory in exactly the opposite fashion. Catullus came to a very harsh and savage and ungentlemanly conclusion about Lesbia; but he came to a conclusion. There was something in the whole tremendous tradition of the great tragic and comic poets of the past, which tended of its nature to be monumental. Dante set up a stone over Beatrice and Catullus threw a stone at Lesbia; but they were both big stones and they. have remained upon the graves. Both felt sure that their gesture was final; and that it really represented what they felt. The very sound of song, the very nature of the opening phrase, was something like that; ‘To praise, exalt, establish, and defend’. Or else it was, ‘To curse, confound, destroy, and leave for dead’. But that full throated and final utterance is somehow lacking amid the many and varied voices of modern self-expression, though they claim to have an unprecedented liberty and often do, in fact, have an almost intolerable anarchy. That is the one limit that is really, though silently recognized in current culture and philosophy; and not even the most thoughtful obscenity, or the most fastidious form of madness, can be altogether a substitute for that fullness of life and that firmness of language. It is the new orthodoxy that a man may be uncertain of every thing; so long as he is not certain of anything.
I have taken a text from a particular poem; because it so happens that the very terms of that text cover almost every point in the particular case. I will even take those terms in turn, in order to show exactly what I mean. The first words are, ‘To praise’. Men have praised all sorts of worthy and unworthy things; they have praised God and golden calves and gold-diggers; tyrants and trivial fops and fashionable leaders; and women dead, like Beatrice, or false, like Lesbia. But even if this praise was false as the lady, it always took on the tone of true and triumphant praise; it always tried to blow the trumpet, though it were the brazen and not the golden trumpet. But the modern poet, though not wholly unaware of his own existence, has not the breath to blow a trumpet; not even his own trumpet. The very noises that come from his musical instrument are of a wavering and inconclusive sort; and if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle? For that matter, even the trumpets of the most triumphant wedding march fail to make that sort of person prepare himself for the wedding. It is a very queer feature of current poetry that there is hardly anywhere such a thing as a love poem; though there is really rather too much poetry about love. The truth is that the poetry is not really about t love, or even about lust. It is about something that they call Sex, which is considered from the outside rather than the inside, being at best a subject rather for science than for literature. At the best, they produce a certain amount of psychology, even when it is not psychopathy; and psychology is not poetry.
The second term, ‘exalt’ is equally essential, but rather more mystical. It is concerned with a process that has accompanied praise, whenever it was great enough to be also poetry. It is connected with the idea of lifting a thing on to a plane in some way analogous at least to that of sacred things. This was the secret of a certain heroic quality in more primitive forms of patriotism. It is not altogether a legend that the patriotism of the City States of Antiquity was a statelier sort of business than the patriotism of the Industrial City of modern times. And the reason was that the heroes were not only praising themselves; they were not even praising only the City; they were praising the gods of the City. That is very different from the modern tribal pride, according to which all the citizens are gods. The modern clerk or stock broker, who is ‘something in the City’, may be very patriotic and read a very patriotic newspaper. But he does not praise the gods of the City, he would have some difficulty in finding any gods in the City to praise. The real danger of that parody of patriotism, is that the patriots themselves are supposed to be gods. To all real praise must be added something of that exaltation of the thing worshipped, which is also separation and withdrawal.
But if we insist on the word ‘exalt’, we must equally insist on the word ‘establish’. There seems to be a crazy tradition from the Byronic or Bohemian culture, that poetry must be revolutionary in the sense of destructive. It would seem obvious that poetry can only be creative. But poetry can also be, in a way of its own, constructive. The lover wishes to establish what he loves; whether to establish a woman in a household, or a just law in a city, or a type of life or landscape which he wishes to see endure; but his attitude must be one not of doubt but of demand. The poet is by derivation the Maker, and wishes, not only to imagine but to make.
Lastly, it is only fair to say, even for the poor distracted patriots of these distracting days, that all this will be utterly meaningless, unless modern morality can bring itself to add to it the ringing and decisive word ‘defend’. That is where so much of the Pacifist argument never ends, because it never begins. Multitudes of modern men unconsciously shirk the perfectly obvious point that, whatever they want to do, they cannot do it unless they are ready to defend it. You cannot have any ideal, whether political or poetical, without wanting to ‘establish’ it; and the moment you establish it, somebody else can make you defend it. ‘To praise, exalt, establish, and defend’; I do not apologize for repeating the words; for they are much needed in these times.
ON THE TRUE ARTIST
IT has lately been noted that the artists who started with entirely new artistic methods have now themselves returned to more realistic methods, and what some would call more reasonable methods. According to the pioneer theory of progress, of which we have all heard so much, they ought by this time to have shot far out of sight, and be enjoying the society of our great-great-grandchildren. For it is supposed to be the duty of this singular sort of pioneer to lose sight entirely of the army which he leads.
Of course, the whole metaphor is a muddle; most of that modern theory of progress is a muddle of metaphors. A pioneer does not lead an army; he is merely a man who walks in front of it and is as much under the orders of the general command as the last man who walks behind it. But, accepting the vague imagery of those who talk of a pioneer when they mean a prophet, it is clear that the pioneer sometimes falls back on the main body of the advance. In other words, the prophet sometimes gets tired of the society of the babe unborn (who may be an uncommunicative companion) and seeks for companions even among contemporaries. I cannot pronounce upon the case of pictorial art, but in the parallel case of literature there is perhaps something to be said about the tests of such a return to society, and of whether and when it is a return to sanity.
The first truth involved is a truism, but a truism often as little understood as any mystery. It is that the artist is a person who communicates something. He may communicate it more or less easily and quickly; he may communicate it to a larger or smaller number of people. But it is a question of communication and not merely of what some people call expression. Or rather, strictly speaking, unless it is communication it is not expression. I know that for some time past it has been the custom to talk of the artist expressing something as if it only meant his getting rid of something. It may be natural that the artist should want to get rid of his art; especially when we consider what it is sometimes like. But it is not his business only to deliver himself; It is, I say very solemnly, his business to deliver the goods. This, as I say, is a truism, but it is one that is strangely forgotten in a great deal of the fashionable fuss about artistic self-expression. The artist does ultimately exhibit himself as being intelligent by being intelligible. I do not say by being easy to understand, but certainly by being understood.
