The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day/Chapter 7
VII.
"Away with love verses, sugared in rhyme—the intrigues, amours of idlers,
Fitted for only banquets of the night, where dancers to late music slide;
The unhealthy pleasures, extravagant dissipations of the few."
Is this London? Is this the year 1872? That peep of blue up yonder resembles the sky, and these figures that pass seem men and women. What evil dream, then, what malignant influence is upon me? Weary of surveying the poetry of the past, and listening to the amatory wails of generations, I walk down the streets, and lo! again harlots stare from the shop-windows, and the great Alhambra posters cover the dead-walls. I go to the theatre which is crowded nightly, and I listen in absolute amaze to the bestialities of Geneviève de Brabant. I walk in the broad day, and a dozen hands offer me indecent prints. I step into a bookseller's shop, and behold! I am recommended to purchase a reprint of the plays and novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn. I buy a cheap republican newspaper, thinking that there, at least, I shall find some relief, if only in the wildest stump oratory, and I am saluted instead in these words:—
"Fanny Hill. Genuine edition, illustrated. Two volumes, 2s. 6d. each. Lovers' Festival, plates, 3s. 6d. Adventures of a Lady's Maid, 2s. 6d. Intrigues of a Ballet Girl, 2s. 6d. Aristotle, illustrated, 2s. French Transparent Cards, 1s. the set. Cartes de Visite from life, 1s. List two stamps. London: H. D——, 15, St. M—— R——d, C——ll.
"Fanny Hill, coloured plates, 2 vols. 4s.; Aristotle's Masterpiece, plates, 2s. 6d.; Life of the celebrated Moll Flanders, 5s. 6d.; Mysteries of a Convent, 1s. List sent on receipt of two stamps. E. B——, 9, R——n S——t, B—— S——, E.
"The Bachelor's Scarf Pin, containing secret photos of pretty women, 24 stamps; French Cards, 1s. the set; Life of a Ballet Girl, 2s. 6d.; Bang-up Reciter, 2s.; Maria Monk, 1s. 6d.; Fanny Hill, with plates, 3s. 6d. Lists two stamps. C. N——, 4, K——'s S—— Avenue, B——."
Step where I may, the snake Sensualism spits its venom upon me. The deeper I probe the public sore, the more terrible I find its nature. I ask my physician for his experience; he only shakes his head, and dares not utter all he knows. I consult the police; they give me such details of unapproachable crime as fill my soul with horror. Returning home, I meet a friend, who tells me that the Society for the Suppression of Vice has at last stirred itself, and that the Lord Chamberlain, moreover, has interdicted the last foul importation from France.[1] O for a scourge to whip these money-changers of Vice for ever out of the Temple!
Now, God forbid that I should charge any living English poet with desiring to encourage debauchery and to demoralise the public. I believe that both Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Rossetti are honest men, pure according to their lights, loving what is beautiful, conscientiously following what inspiration lies within them. They do not quite realise that they are merely supplementing the literature of Holywell Street, and writing books well worthy of being sold under "sealed covers." Much of Mr. Swinburne's grossness has come of the mad aggressiveness of youth, fostered by reading the worst French poets. Nearly all Mr. Rossetti's effeminacy comes of eternal self-contemplation, of trashy models, of want of response to the needs and the duties of his time. What stuff is this they are putting forward, or suffering their coterie to put forward for them? It is time, they say, that the simple and natural delights of the Body should be sung as holy; it is unbearable, they echo, that purists should object to the record of sane pleasures of sense; it is just, they reiterate, that Passion should have its poetry and the Flesh its vindication.[2] As if the "simple and natural delights of the body" had not been occupying our poetry ever since the days of the "Confessio Amantis!" As if sane (and for that matter, insane) pleasures of sense had not been the stock-in-trade of nine-tenths of all our poets and poetasters, from Wyatt to Swinburne! As if Passion had been silent until this year of the Lord 1872, and as if, till the advent of a Rossetti, the world had entirely lost sight of the Flesh! The Flesh and the Body have been sung till the Muses are hoarse again. Two-thirds of our poetry is all Body; nine-tenths of our poets are all Flesh. One would think, from this outcry, that the amative faculty was a new organ discovered by some phrenological bard of the period, and never before traced as having any influence on the human race. One would fancy, from some of our modern criticisms, that the only English poets up to this period had been Milton, holy Mr. Herbert, and the author of the "Christian Year!" One would swear, to hear these Cupids of the new Fleshly Epoch, that English literature had been veritably getting blue-mouldy with too much virtue, and that the Spirit of Imagination had lived in a nunnery, fed on pulse and cold water, since Chaucer's time, instead of rioting in a lupanar, fed on hot meat and spiced wine, for hundreds upon hundreds of years!
Perhaps, if the truth were told, we have had a little too much of the Body. Perhaps, if we push the matter home, it is no more rational to rave of the "just delights of the flesh" than it would be to talk of the "glorious liberty" of "sweating" and the "sane celebration" of the right to "spit." Perhaps, after all, since so many centuries of Sexuality have done so little for poetry, it might be advantageous to give Spirituality a trial, and to see if her efforts to create a literature are equally unsuccessful.
In answer to all this, it may be retorted—in the easiest form of retort known to mankind— that I am a Philistine, that I would emasculate our poets altogether, and that I would substitute for passion the merest humanitarian and other "sentiment." Well, although I fear that I am a Puritan in a certain sense, I trust I am not a purist in the worst sense. My favourite ancient poet is the author of "Atys." I prefer Shakspere to Milton, and I would not obliterate a line, however coarse, of Chaucer. I love Rabelais, and hold (with Coleridge) that he is deep and pure as the sea. I know no pleasanter reading for an idle hour than La Fontaine, no richer reading for a thoughtful hour than certain (by no means unimpeachable) novels of Balzac. I see the strangest erotic forces in the loves of Wilhelm Meister, but I admit their beauty and their worth. I welcome Heine, and could listen to his mad laughter for a summer day. I love Byron better than Tupper, and of all Byron's books I best love "Don Juan." I reverence Hugo, and I see nothing in him that is shocking, save, perhaps, certain abominable eccentricities in "L'Homme qui Rit." I still beguile many an hour, when snug at anchor in some lovely Highland loch, with the inimitable, yet questionable, pictures of Parisian life left by Paul de Kock; and I know no sweeter poet in some respects than the egregious Alfred de Musset. To my thinking, there is no grander passage in literature than that tremendous scene between Ottilia and her paramour, in "Pippa Passes:" no one accuses the author of that, and of the "Ring and the Book," of neglecting love or overlooking the body; and yet I do daily homage to the genius of Robert Browning, I deem "Vivien" an essential pendant to that wonderful apotheosis of Masculine Chastity, which is the heart of that Arthurian epic on which the laureate has poured all his orient poetic wealth. I have praised Whitman, and hope to praise him over and over again. I know no fresher, finer work of this generation than certain novels by Mr. Charles Reade, who is not generally considered an ascetic author. In one word, I have no earthly objection to the Body and the Flesh in their rightful time and place, as part of great work and noble art; I do not see any great wickedness in the old-fashioned use of the gaudriole; and I am ready (as any sane man must be ready) to regard with kindness, and even sympathy, all work of a really good and honest author, even if it here and there, as I may think, exceeds the just limits of reserve, and becomes indecent, as sometimes happens, by sheer force of power. But Flesh, merely as the Flesh, is too much for me. I find it foolish, querulous, affected, uninteresting. I do not admire its absurd manner of considering itself the Soul. I grudge it none of its just delights, even in the way of "lipping" and "munching;" only, let it enjoy them without making such a coil about them. The world never tires of real passion; it will listen to Burns's love-songs for ever; but fleshliness is not necessarily passion, and may abound in natures utterly passionless. There are many other functions of the flesh which it is not the custom to perform in public, but which are quite as interesting to third parties as what Shakspere calls "the deed." Really, if we set no limit to the flesh, it is certain to disgrace us in the long-run. It has already created a literature in Holywell Street. Shall we suffer it to found a poetry in St. John's Wood?
English Verse-poetry has been, up to the present moment, almost exclusively the property of querulous persons, engaged in contemplating their own images—either in an ordinary looking-glass or in the eyes of a fantastic female. We have had a certain number of great poets who have chosen to use rhymed and metrical speech—our very greatest, indeed, have spoken in this way; but many of our noblest—such as Bacon, Bunyan, and Thomas Carlyle—have chosen to use simple prose as their means of expression; and the last of these prose-poets has very recently, in a remarkable letter to a gentleman who had sent him some verses, protested energetically that he would infinitely have preferred a good bit of solid simple prose—that, in fact, Verse is an artificial sort of thing, by no means to be encouraged at this time of day. Rough and sweeping as this condemnation of Verse appears to be, there is a certain homely truth about it. It has been the unfortunate habit of most of our poets, and especially of those we have been specially criticizing in this article, to use Verse as the vehicle of whatever thoughts are too thin or too fantastic, too much of the sweet-pea order of products, to stand without the aid of rhythmical props. Ideas too bald for prose, too trivial to stand unadorned, appear unique enough when subjected to the euphuistic process, and robed in all the wordy glitter of rhyme. If any English author, in good round prose, were to call Death "a seizure of malign vicissitude," and compare Life to a Lady with whom he ranged the world till he found a fit "bower" for nuptial performances; or if any author were to narrate for us, still in good round prose, such a savoury narrative as that of "The Leper" in Mr. Swinburne's poems, surely he would very soon receive his just deserts. Yet simply because such ideas and such stories are told in lines cut into certain lengths and jingling at the ends; solely because, by one-half the public, verse is recognised as an unnatural and altogether artificial form of speech, the trash of windy men is christened Art, and writers without one ray of imagination are accredited with the genius of song. It thus happens that, in the opinion of many people, the word "poet" is synonymous with "madman;" and we are told again and again not to judge such and such compositions too severely, as "they are only poetry." It thus happens that we every day behold the melancholy spectacle of inferior men giving themselves the airs of great men merely because they can write meretricious verses. Why, I will venture to say that there is more real genius and more true literary brilliance in any one of Mr. G. A. Sala's "Dutch Pictures" than in all the fleshly products heaped together, and yet Mr. Sala only calls himself a "special correspondent," and is far, very far, from being a "poetical" person. If poetry—Verse-poetry—is to be anything else than an impediment to progress, if it is to become something better than the resource of feeble talents unable to stand without artificial aid, it must be more and more approximated to the natural language of men; it must be weeded of the hideous phraseology of the schools, and sown with the fresh and beautiful idioms of daily speech; and it must deal with great issues in which all men are interested, not with the "damnable face-making" of Narcissus in a mirror. Elsewhere, notably in Germany, such experiments are encouraged as tend to broaden and strengthen the resources of poetry, and to multiply its facilities; but here in England every fresh experiment in language is ridiculed and disliked, unless it be a retrograde experiment, trebling the limitations and quadrupling the affectations of ancient rhyme. Mr. Swinburne's eternal jingle, and Mr. Rosseti's affected harpsichord-melody, are admired, though they throw us back hundreds of years; but not one grain of sympathy has been shown for the metrical importations, often exquisite, of Mr. Matthew Arnold, the never-ending experiments of the late Arthur Hugh Clough (a giant who died young, and alas! has left no one who fills his place in the van of thought), and the wonderful poetic prose, or prose-poetry, of Walt Whitman. The public appears to be willing that verse-poetry should remain the property of men of talent, anxious to increase its already almost insuperable limitations; and it thus happens that our men and women of genius—such as Carlyle, Hugo, Reade, Emerson, Hawthorne—have written some of the best poetry of this generation in simple prose.[3]
The name of Poet was once a title of honour; it bids fair soon to be a title of ridicule. The form of Verse was at one period held to be the noblest possible kind of human utterance; but that form, remaining as it does in the swaddling-clothes of infant speech, will possibly be more or less abandoned as time rolls on by the thinkers and dreamers of the world. The word poetry may one day be identical with absurdity; and no one will jingle the cap and bells of rhyme but a fool. Is there no hope? Yes, a gleam. All the blundering and all the time-wasting in our literature have been caused by eternal posturing before the mirror. Each feeble talent has been so fascinated by his own image as to dwindle into an intellectual daisy or pine into a poetical primrose. Our literary shame has sprung from want of knowledge of how the world wags, of how men and women live and love, of what mighty forces are sweeping across the earth their angels' wings. Let the Sultan of Literature, if there be such a person (and if not, we might do worse than elect the functionary), issue forth an edict ordering the destruction of all looking-glasses, and the immediate silencing of all persons who introduce the subject of their own emotions. This would at least have the effect of driving our poets, if they must see themselves, to see themselves in flowing Rivers or the mighty Sea, and to wail aloud, if wail they must, to the four Winds of Heaven; and thus they might come in time to find how little account they themselves are in the great scheme of nature, and how much is to be done on earth besides making night and day hideous with sensual shadows and dreams. Yet, after all, I fear there would be evasion even then; for ten to one you would find some Simple Simon of the amatory type, driven to despair by the universal destruction of looking-glasses, filling the family washing-tub with water from the pump, and pining away into a shadow for love of his own image hovering therein!
- ↑ An interdiction which, says the Athenæum, "is the most wanton violation of liberty, and the most unwarrantable interference with Art, that modern times have witnessed!" It is to be hoped, however, that the Lord Chamberlain will not be dispirited by the indignation of Sir Charles Dilke's journal, which, as the leading organ of the Fleshly School, is as peculiar in its notions of literary decency as Sir Charles himself in his notions of political propriety.
- ↑ See, for example, "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" addressed by an English Lady to W. M. Rossetti (1870).
- ↑ "The French Revolution," "Les Misérables," "The Cloister and the Hearth," Emerson's first set of Essays, and "The Scarlet Letter"—all these works are "poems" in the noblest sense.