To
Theodore Watts-Dunton
Dedicatory Epistle
To my best and dearest friend I dedicate the first collected edition
of my poems, and to him I address what I have to say on the occasion.
You will agree with me that it is impossible for any man to undertake the task of
commentary, however brief and succinct, on anything he has done or tried to do, without
incurring the charge of egoism. But there are two kinds of egoism, the furtive and
the frank:
and the outspoken and open-hearted candour of Milton and
Wordsworth, Corneille and Hugo,
is not the least or the lightest of their claims to the regard as well as the respect
or the
reverence of their readers. Even if I were worthy to claim
kinship
with the lowest or with the highest of these deathless names, I would not seek to
shelter myself under the shadow of its authority. The question would still remain
open on all
sides. Whether it is worth while for any man to offer any remarks or for any other
man to read
his remarks on his own work, his own ambition, or his own attempts, he cannot of course
determine. If there are great examples of abstinence
from such a doubtful enterprise, there are likewise great examples to the contrary. As long as the writer can succeed
in evading the kindred charges and cognate risks of vanity and humility, there can
be no reason
why he should not undertake it. And when he has nothing to regret and nothing to recant,
when
he finds nothing that he could wish to cancel, to alter, or to unsay, in any page
he has ever
laid before his reader, he need not be seriously troubled by the inevitable consciousness
that
the work of his early youth is not and cannot be unnaturally unlike the work of a
very young
man. This would be no excuse for it, if it were in any sense bad work: if it be so,
no apology
would avail; and I certainly have none to offer.
It is now thirty-six years since my first volume of miscellaneous verse, lyrical
and
dramatic and elegiac and generally heterogeneous, had as quaint a reception and as
singular a
fortune as I have ever heard or read of. I do not think you will differ from my opinion
that
what is best in it cannot be divided from what is not so good by any other line of
division
than that which makes off mature from immature execution—in other words, complete
from incomplete conception. For its author the most amusing and satisfying result
of the
clatter aroused by it was the deep diversion of collating and comparing the variously
inaccurate verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who insisted on regarding
all the
studies of passion or sensation attempted or achieved
in it as either confessions of positive fact or
excursion
of absolute fancy. There are photographs from life in the book; and there are
sketches from imagination. Some which keen-sighted criticism has dismissed with a
smile as
ideal or imaginary were as real and actual as they well could be: others which have
been taken
for obvious transcripts from memory were utterly fantastic or dramatic. If the two
kinds cannot
be distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an artist whose
medium or
material has more in common with a musician’s than with a sculptor’s. Friendly and
kindly
critics, English and foreign, have detected ignorance of the subject in poems taken
straight
from the life, and have protested that they could not believe me were I to swear that
poems
entirely or mainly fanciful were not faithful expressions or transcriptions of the
writer’s
actual experience and personal emotion. But I need not remind you that all I do to
say about
this book was said once for all in the year of its publication: I have nothing to
add to my
notes then taken, and I have nothing to retract from them. To parade or to disclaim
experience
of passion or of sorrow, of pleasure or pain, is the habit and the sign of a school
which has
never found a disciple among the better sort of English poets, and which I know to
be no less
pitifully contemptible in your opinion than in mine.
In my next work it should be superfluous to say that there is no touch of dramatic
impersonation or imaginary emotion. The writer of
Songs before Sunrise, from the first line to the last, wrote
simply in submissive obedience to Sir Philip Sidney’s precept —
Look in thine heart, and write. The dedication of these poems, and the fact
that dedication was accepted, must be sufficient evidence of this. They do not pretend
and they
were never intended to be merely the metrical echoes, or translations into lyric verse,
of
another man’s doctrine. Mazzini was no more a Pope or a
Dictator than I was a parasite or a papist. Dictation and inspiration are rather
different things. These poems, and others which followed or preceded them in print,
were
inspired by such faith as is born of devotion and reverence; not by such faith, if
faith it may
be called, as is synonymous with servility or compatible with prostration of an abject
or
wavering spirit and a submissive or dethroned intelligence. You know that I never
pretended to
see eye to eye with my illustrious friends and masters, Victor Hugo and
Giuseppe Mazzini, in regard to the positive and passionate confidence of
their sublime and purified theology. Our betters ought to know better than we: they
would be
the last to wish that we should pretend to their knowledge, or assume a certitude
which is
theirs and is not ours. But on one point we surely cannot but be at one with them:
that the
spirit and the letter of all other than savage and barbarous religions are irreconcilably
at
variance, and that prayer or homage addressed to an image of our own or of other men’s
making,
be that image avowedly material or conventionally
spiritual, is the affirmation of idolatry with all its attendant atrocities, and the
negation
of all belief, all reverence, and all love, due to the noblest object of human worship
that
humanity can realise or conceive. Thus much the exercise of our common reason might
naturally
suffice to show us: but when its evidence is confirmed and fortified by the irrefragable
and
invariable
evidence
of history, there is no room for further dispute or fuller argument on a subject
now
visibly beyond reach and eternally beyond need of debate or
demonstration
. I know not whether it may or may not be worth while to add that every passing word
I
have since thought fit to utter on any national or political question has been as
wholly
consistent with the
principles
which I then did my best to proclaim and defend as my apostasy from the faith of
all
republicans in the fundamental and final principle of union, voluntary if possible
and
compulsory if not, would have been ludicrous in the imprudence of its inconsistency
with those
simple and irreversible principles. Monarchists and anarchists may be advocates of
national
dissolution
and reactionary division; republicans cannot be. The first and last article of their
creed is unity: the most grinding and crushing tyranny of a convention, a directory,
or a despot,
is less incompatible with republican faith than the fissiparous democracy of disunionists
or
communalists.
If the fortunes of my lyrical work were amusingly eccentric and accidental, the varieties
of
opinion which have saluted the appearance of my plays
have been, or have seemed to my humility, even more diverting and curious. I have
been told by
reviewers of note and position that a single one of them is worth all my lyric and
otherwise
undramatic
achievements or attempts: and I have been told on equal or similar authority that,
whatever I may be in any other field, as a dramatist I am demonstrably nothing. My
first if not
my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly unworthy of
a young
countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the
pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had left
as a possibly attainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my first book, written
while yet
under academic or tutorial authority, bore evidence of that ambition in every line.
I should be
the last to deny that it also bore evidence of the fact that its writer had no more
notion of
dramatic or theatrical construction than the authors of Tamburlaine the
Great , King Henry VI., and Sir
Thomas Wyatt. Not much more, you may possibly say, was
discernible
in Chastelard : a play also conceived and partly
written by a youngster not yet emancipated from servitude to college rule. I fear
that in the
former volume there had been little if any promise of power to grapple with the realities
and
subtleties of character and motive: that whatever may be in it of promise or of merit
must be
sought in the language and the style of such better passages as may perhaps be found
in single and separable speeches of
Catherine and Rosamond. But in Chastelard there are two figures and a sketch in which I
certainly seem to see something of real and evident life. The sketch of
Darnley was afterwards filled out and finished in the subsequent tragedy
of Bothwell. That ambitious, conscientious, and
comprehensive
piece of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the old
Shakespearen term of a chronicle history. The radical difference between tragic history and
tragedy of either the classic or the romantic order, and consequently between the
laws which
govern the one and the principles which guide the other, you have yourself made clear
and
familiar to all capable students. The play of mine was not, I think, inaccurately
defined as an
epic drama in the French verses of dedication which were acknowledged by the greatest
of all
French poets in a letter from which I dare only quote one line of Olympian judgment
and godlike
generosity. ‘Occuper ces deux cimes, cela n’est donné
qu’à vous.’ Nor will I refrain from the confession that I cannot think it an
epic or a play in which any one part is sacrificed to any other, any subordinate figure
mishandled or neglected or
distorted
or effaced for the sake of the predominant and central person. And, though this has
nothing or less than nothing to do with any question of poetic merit or demerit, of
dramatic
success or unsuccess, I will add that I took as much care and pains as though I had
been writing or compiling a history of the
period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came within the scope
of my
dramatic or poetic design. There is not one which I have designedly altered or intentionally
modified: it is of course for others to decide whether there is one which is not the
living
likeness of an actual or imaginable man.
The third part of this trilogy , as far as I know or remember, found favour only
with the
only man in England who could speak on the subject of historic drama
with the authority of an expert and a master. The generally ungracious reception of
Mary Stuart gave me neither surprise nor disappointment: the
cordial approbation or rather the generous applause of Sir Henry Taylor
gave me all and more than all the satisfaction I could ever have looked for in recompense
of as
much painstaking and
conscientious
though interesting and enjoyable work as can ever, I should imagine, have been
devoted to the completion of any comparable design. Private and personal appreciation
I have
always thought and often found more valuable and delightful than all possible or imaginable
clamour
of public praise. This preference will perhaps be supposed to influence my opinion
if I avow
that I think I have never written anything worthier of such reward than the closing
tragedy
which may or may not have deserved but which certainly received it.
My first attempt to do something original in
English which might in some degree reproduce for English readers the likeness of a Greek
tragedy, with possibly something more of its true poetic life and charm than could
have
expected from the authors of Caractacus and Merope, was perhaps too exuberant and effusive in its dialogue, as
it certainly was too irregular in the occasional license of its choral verse, to accomplish
the
design or achieve the success which its author should have aimed at. It may or may
not be too
long as a poem: it is, I fear, too long for a poem of the kind to which it belongs
or aims at
belonging. Poetical and mathematical truth are so different that I doubt, however
unwilling I
may naturally be to doubt, whether it can truthfully be said of Atalanta in Calydon that the whole is greater than any part of it. I hope it may be,
and I can honestly say no more. Of Erechtheus I venture to
believe with somewhat more confidence that it can. Either poem, by the natural necessity
of its
kind and structure, has its crowning passage or passages which cannot,
however
much they may lose by detachment from their context, lose as much as the crowning
scene or scenes of an English or Shakespearen play, as opposed to an
Aeschylean or Sophoclean tragedy, must lose and ought to lose by a
similar separation. The two best things in these two Greek plays, the
antiphonal lamentation for the dying Meleager and the choral presentation
of stormy battle between the forces of land and sea, lose less by such division from
the main body of the poem than would those scenes in Bothwell which deal with the turning-point in the life of
Mary Stuart on the central and conclusive day of Carberry
Hill.
It might be thought pedantic or pretentious in a modern poet to divide his poems
after the
old Roman fashion into sections and classes: I must confess that I should like to
see this
method applied, were it but by way of experiment in a single edition, to the work
of the
leading poets of our own country and century: to see, for instance, their lyrical
and elegiac
works arranged and registerd apart, each kind in a class of its own, such as is usually
reserved, I know not why, for sonnets only. The apparent formality of such an arrangement
as
would give us, for instance, the odes of Coleridge and
Shelley collected into a distinct reservation or division might possibly
be more than compensated to the more capable among students by the gain in ethical
or spiritual
symmetry and aesthetic or intellectual harmony. The ode or hymn—I need remind no probable
reader that the terms are synonymous in the
speech of Pindar— asserts its primacy or pre-eminence over other
forms of poetry in the very name which defines or proclaims it as essentially the
song; as
something above all less pure and absolute kinds of song by the very nature and law
of its
being. The Greek form, with its regular arrangement of turn, return, and aftersong, is not to
be imitated because it is Greek, but to be adopted because it is best: the very best,
as a
rule, that could be imagined for lyrical expression of
the thing conceived or lyrical aspiration towards the aim imagined. The rhythmic reason
of its
rigid but not arbitrary law lies simply and solely in the charm of its regular variations.
This
can be given in English as clearly and fully, if not so sweetly and subtly, as in
Greek; and
should, therefore, be expected and required in an English poem of the same nature
and
proportion. The Sapphic or Alcaic, a simple sequence of identical
stanzas, could be imitated or revived in Latin by translators or disciples: the scheme
of it is
exquisitively adequate and sufficient for comparatively short flights of passion or
emotion,
ardent or contemplative and personal or patriotic; but what can be done in English
could not be
attempted in Latin. It seems strange to me, our language being what it is, that our
literature
should be no richer than it is in examples of the higher or at least the more capacious
and
ambitious kind of ode. Not that the full Pindaric form of threefold or triune structure need be
or should be always adopted: but without an accurately corresponsive or antiphonal
scheme of
music even the master of masters, who is Coleridge, could not produce,
even through the superb and enchanting melodies of such a poem as his Dejection, a fit and complete companion, a full and perfect rival, to such a poem as
his ode on France.
The title of ode may more properly and fairly be so extended as to cover all lyrical
poems in
stanzas or couplets than so strained as to include a lawless lyric of such irregular
and uneven build as
Coleridge only and hardly could make acceptable or admissible among more
natural and lawful forms of poetry. Law, not lawlessness, is the natural condition
of poetic
life; but the law must itself be poetic and not pedantic, natural and not conventional.
It
would be a trivial precision or restriction which would refuse the title of ode to
the stanzas
of Milton or the
heptameters
of Aristophanes ; that glorious form of lyric verse which a
critic of our own day, as you may not impossibly remember, has likened with such
magnificent
felicity of comparison to the gallop of the horses of the sun. Nor, I presume, should
this title be denied to a poem written in the more modest metre—more modest as being
shorter by a foot— which was chosen for those twin poems of antiphonal correspondence
in subject and in sound, the Hymn to Proserpine and the Hymn of Man: the death-song of spiritual decadence and the birthsong
of spiritual renascence. Perhaps, too, my first stanzas addressed to Victor
Hugo may be ranked as no less of an ode than that on the insurrection in
Candia: a poem which attracted, whether or not it may have deserved,
the notice and commendation of Mazzini: from whom I received, on the
occasion of its
appearance
, a letter which was the beginning of my personal intercourse with the man whom I
had
always revered above all other men on earth. But for this happy accident I might not
feel
disposed to set much store by my first attempt at a regular ode of orthodox or legitimate
construction: I doubt whether it quite succeeded in
evading the criminal risk and the capital offence of formality: at least until the
change of
note in the closing epode gave fuller scope and freer play of wing to the musical
expression.
But in my later ode on Athens, absolutely faithful as it is in form to the strictest
type and
the most stringent law of Pindaric hymnology, I venture to believe that there is no more sign
of this infirmity than is in the less classically regulated poem on the Armada; which,
though
built on a new scheme, is nevertheless in its way, I think, a legitimate ode, by right
of its
regularity
in general arrangement of corresponsive
divisions
. By the test of these two poems I am content that my claims should be decided and
my
station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of the term; a craftsman in
the most
ambitious line of his art that ever aroused or ever can arouse the emulous aspiration
of his
kind.
Even had I ever felt the same impulse to attempt and the same ambition to achieve
the
enterprise of epic or narrative that I had always felt with regard to lyric or dramatic
work, I
could never have
proposed
to myself the lowly and unambitious aim of competition with the work of so notable
a
contemporary
workman in the humbler branch of that line as William Morris. No
conception could have been further from my mind when I undertook to rehandle the deathless
legend of Tristram than that of so modest and preposterous a trial of
rivalry. My aim was simply to present that story,
not diluted and debased as it had been in our own time by other hands, but undefaced
by
improvement and
undeformed
by transformation, as it was known to the age of Dante whenever
the chronicles of romance found hearing, from Ercildoune to
Florence: and not in the epic or romantic form of sustained or
continuous
narrative, but mainly through a succession of dramatic scenes or pictures with
descriptive
settings
or backgrounds: the scenes being of the
simplest
construction, duologue or monologue, without so much as the classically permissible
intervention of a third or fourth person. It is only in our native northern form of
narrative
poetry, on the old and unrivalled model of the English ballad, that I can claim to have done
any work of the kind worth
reference
: unless the story of Balen should be considered as something other than
a series or sequence of ballads. A more plausible objection was brought to bear against
Tristram of Lyonesse than that of failure in an enterprise which I
never thought of undertaking: the objection of an irreconcilable
incongruity
between the incidents of the old legend and the meditations on man and nature, life
and death, chance and destiny, assigned to a typical hero of chivalrous romance. And
this
objection might be unanswerable if the slightest attempt had been made to treat the
legend as
in any possible sense historical or capable of either rational or ideal association
with
history, such as would assimilate the name and fame of
Arthur to the name and fame of any actual and indisputable
Alfred or Albert of the future. But the age when
these romances actually lived and flourished side by side with the reviving legends
of
Thebes and Troy, not in the crude and bloodless forms of Celtic and
archaic fancy but in the ampler and manlier developments of Teutonic and mediaeval
imagination, was the age of Dante and Chaucer: an age
in which men were only too prone to waste their time on the twin sciences of astrology
and
theology, to expand their energies in the jungle of pseudosophy or the morass of metaphysics.
There is surely nothing more
incongruous
or anachronic in the soliloquy of Tristram after his separation
from Iseult than in the lecture of Theseus after the
obsequies of Arcite. Both heroes belong to the same impossible age of an
imaginary world: and each has an equal right, should it so please his chronicler,
to reason in
the pauses of action and philosophise in the intervals of
adventure
. After all, the active men of the actual age of chivalry were not all of them mere
muscular machines for martial or pacific exercise of their physical functions or abilities.
You would agree, if the point were worth
discussion
, that it might savour somewhat of pretension, if not of affectation, to be over
particular in
arrangement
of poems according to subject than form, spirit rather than method, or
motive rather than
execution
: an yet there might be some excuse for the fancy or the pedantry of such a
classification as should set apart, for example, poems
inspired by the influence of places, whether seen but once or familiar for years or
associated
with the earliest memories within cognisance or record of the mind, and poems inspired
by the
emotions of regard or regret for the living or the dead; above all, by the rare and
profound
passion of reverence and love and faith which labours and rejoices to find utterance
in some
tributary sacrifice of song. Mere descriptive poetry of the prepense and formal kind
is
exceptionally if not proverbially liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dullness:
it is
unnecessary to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the presence or the emotion
of a
spectator, but it is necessary to make it felt and keep it perceptible if the poem
is to have
life in it or even right to live: felt as in Wordsworth’s work it is
always, perceptible as it is always in Shelley’s. This note is more plain
and positive than usual in the poem which attempts—at once a simple and so ambitious
attempt—to render the contrast and the concord of night and day on Loch
Torridon: it is, I think, duly sensible though implicitly subdued in four poems
of the West Undercliff, born or
begotten
of sunset in the bay and moonlight on the cliffs, noon or morning in a living and
shining garden, afternoon or twilight on one left flowerless and forsaken. Not to
you or any
other poet, nor indeed to the very humblest and simplest lover of poetry, will it
seem
incongruous or strange, suggestive of imperfect sympathy with life or deficient
inspiration
from nature, that the very words of Sappho should be heard and
recognised in the notes of the nightingales, the glory of the presence of dead poets
imagined
in the presence of the glory of the sky, the lustre of their advent and their passage
felt
visible as in vision on the live and limpid floorwork of the
cloudless
and sunset-coloured sea. The half-brained
creature
to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw
with the fingers of a mole his dullard’s distinction between books and life: those
who live the
fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of
that life as
pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may
be to the
spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural
to live
while dead in heart and brain. Marlowe and
Shakespeare,
Aeschylus
and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty shelves of
libraries.
It is hardly probable that especial and familiar love of places should give any special
value to verses written under the influence of their charm: no intimacy of years and
no
association with the past gave any colour of emotion to many other studies of
English land and
sea which certainly are no less faithful and possibly have no less spiritual or poetic
life in
them than the four to which I have just referred, whose localities lie all within
the boundary
of a mile or so. No contrast could be stronger than that between the majestic and
exquisite
glory of cliff and crag, lawn and woodland, garden
and lea, to which I have done homage though assuredly I have not done justice in these
four
poems—
In the Bay,
On the Cliffs,
A Forsaken Garden, the
dedication
of
The Sisters—and the dreary beauty,
inhuman
if not unearthly in its desolation, of the
innumerable
creeks and inlets, lined and paven with sea-flowers, which make of the salt marshes
a
fit and funereal setting, a fatal and appropriate foreground, for the supreme desolation
of the
relics of
Dunwich; the beautiful and awful solitude of a wilderness on
which the sea has forbidden man to build or live, overtopped and bounded by the tragic
and
ghastly solitude of a headland on which the sea has forbidden the works of human charity
and
piety to survive; between the dense and sand-encumbered tides which are eating the
desecrated
wreck and ruin of them all away, and the matchless magic, the ineffable
fascination
of the sea whose beauties and delights, whose translucent depths of water and
divers-coloured banks of submarine foliage and flowerage, but faintly reflected in
the stanzas
of the little ode of
Off Shore, complete the charm of the
scenes as faintly sketched or shadowed forth in the poems just named, or the sterner
and
stranger magic of the seaboard to which tribute was paid in
An Autumn
Vision, A Swimmer’s Dream, On
the South Coast, Neap-tide: or, again, between the sterile stretches and sad limitless outlook of the shore
which faces a hitherto undetermined and interminable sea, and the joyful and fateful
beauty of the seas of
Bamborough and the seas about
Sark and
Guernsey. But if there is enough of the human or personal note to
bring into touch the various poems which deal with these various impressions, there
may perhaps
be no less of it discernible in such as try to render the effect of inland or woodland
solitude—the splendid oppression of nature at noon which found utterance of old in
words of such singular and everlasting significance as panic and nympholepsy.
The retrospect across many years over the many eulogistic and elegiac poems which
I have
inscribed or devoted to the commemorations or the panegyric of the living or the dead
has this
in it of pride and pleasure, that I find little to recant and nothing to repent on
reconsideration of them all. If ever a word of tributary thanksgiving for the delight
and the
benefit of loyal admiration evoked in the spirit of a boy or aroused in the intelligence
of
a man may seem to exceed the limit of demonstrable accuracy, I have no apology to
offer for any
such aberration from the safe path of tepid praise or conventional applause. I can
truly say
with Shelley that I have been fortunate in friendships: I might add if I
cared, as he if he had cared might have added, that I have been no less fortunate
in my enemies
than in my friends; and this, though by comparison a matter of ineffable insignificance,
can
hardly be to any rational and right-minded man a matter of positive indifference.
Rather should
it be always a subject for thankfulness and
self-congratulations if a man can honestly and reasonably feel assured that his friends
and
foes alike have been always and at almost all points the very men he would have chosen,
had
choice and foresight been allowed him, at the very outset of his career in life. I
should
never, when a boy, have dared to dream that as a man I might possibly be admitted
to the
personal acquaintance of the three living gods, I do not say of my idolatry, for idolatry
is a
term inapplicable where the gods are real and true, but of my whole-souled and
single-hearted worship: and yet, when writing of Landor, of
Mazzini, and of Hugo, I write of men who have
honoured me with the assurance and the evidence of their cordial and affectionate
regard.
However inadequate and unworthy may be my tribute to their glory when living and their
memory
when dead, it is that of one whose gratitude and devotion found unforgettable favour
in their sight.
And I must be allowed to add that the redeeming quality of entire and absolute sincerity
may be
claimed on behalf of every line I have written in honour of friends, acquaintances,
or
strangers. My tribute to Richard Burton was not more genuine in its
expression than my tribute to Christina Rossetti. Two noble human
creatures more utterly unlike each other it would be
unspeakably
impossible to conceive; but it was as simply natural for one who honoured them both
to do honest homage, before and after they had left us, to the saintly and secluded
poetess as to the adventurous and
unsaintly hero. Wherever anything is worthy of honour and thanksgiving it is or it
always
should be as natural if not as delightful to give thanks and do honour to a stranger
as to a
friend, to a
benefactor
long since dead as to a benefactor still alive. To the kindred spirits of
Philip Sidney and Aurelio Saffi it was almost as
equal a pleasure to offer what tribute I could bring as if Sidney also
could have honoured me with his personal friendship. To Tennyson and
Browning it was no less fit that I should give honour than that I should
do homage to the memory of Bruno, the martyred friend of
Sidney. And I can hardly remember any task that I ever took more delight
in discharging than I felt in the inadequate and partial payment of a lifelong debt
to the
marvellous and matchless succession of poets who made the glory of our country
incomparable
for ever by the work they did between the joyful date of the rout of the
Armada and the woful date of the outbreak of civil war.
Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you, wrote for antiquity: nor need you
be assured that when I write plays it is with a view to their being acted at the
Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black
Friars. And whatever may be the dramatic or other defects of Marino Faliero or Locrine, they do
certainly bear the same relation to previous plays or attempts at plays on the same
subjects as
King Henry V. to The Famous
Victories —if not as King Lear,
a poem beyond comparison with all other works of man
except possibly Prometheus and Othello, to the primitive and infantile scrawl or drivel of King Leir and his three daughters. The fifth act of Marino
Faliero, hopelessly impossible as it is from the point of view of modern stagecraft,
could hardly have been found too untheatrical, too utterly given over to talk without
action,
by the
audiences
which endured and applauded the magnificent monotony of Chapman’s
eloquence—the fervent and inexhaustible declamation which was offered and accepted
as a substitute for study of character and interest of action when his two finest
plays, if
plays they can be called, found favour with an incredibly intelligent and an inconceivably
tolerant audience. The metrical or executive experiment attempted and carried through
in Locrine would have been improper to any but a purely and wholly
romantic play or poem: I do not think that the life of human character or lifelikeness
of
dramatic dialogue has suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificed to
the exigence
of metre. The tragedy of The Sisters, however defective it may
be in theatrical interest or progressive action, is the only modern
English
play I know in which realism in the reproduction of natural dialogue and accuracy
in
the representation of natural intercourse between men and women of gentle birth and
breeding
have been found or made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.
It is not
for me to decide whether anything in the figures
which play their parts on my imaginary through realistic stage may be worthy of sympathy,
attention, or interest: but I think they talk and act as they would have done in life
without
ever lapsing into platitude or breaking out of nature.
In Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards, I took up a subject long
since mishandled by an English dramatist of all but the highest rank, and one which in later
days Alfieri had commemorated in a
magnificent
passage of a wholly unhistoric and somewhat unsatisfactory play. The comparatively
slight
deviation
from historic records in the final catastrophe or consummation of mine is not, I
think, to say the least, injurious to the tragic effect or the moral interest of the
story.
A writer conscious of any natural command over the musical resources of his language
can
hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or instinct as the
greatest
writer and the greatest versifier of our age must have felt at its highest possible
degree when
composing a musical exercise of such incomparable scope and fullness as Les Djinns. But if he be a poet after the order of Hugo or
Coleridge or Shelley, the result will be something
very much more than a musical exercise; though indeed, except to such ears as should
always be
kept closed against poetry, there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient
fullness
and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of thought, to abide the
analysis of any other than the purblind
scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection of malignity. There may perhaps
be
somewhat more depth and variety of feeling or
reflection
condensed into the narrow frame of the poems which compose A
Century of Roundels than would be needed to fulfil the epic vacuity of a
Choerilus or Coluthus. And the form chosen
for my only narrative poem was chosen as a test of the truth of my conviction that
such work
could be done better on the straitest and the strictest principles of verse than on
the looser
and more slippery lines of mediaeval or modern
improvisation
. The impulsive and irregular verse which had been held sufficient for the stanza
selected or accepted by Thornton and by Tennyson
seemed capable of improvement and invigoration as a vehicle or a medium for poetic
narrative.
And I think it has not been found unfit to give something of dignity as well as facility
to a
narrative which recasts in modern English verse one of the noblest and loveliest old English
legends. There is no episode in the cycle of Arthurian romance more genuinely
Homeric in its sublime simplicity and its pathetic sublimity of submission to the
masterdom of fate than that which I have rather reproduced than recast in The Tale of Balen : and impossible as it is to render the text or
express the spirit of the Iliad in English prose or rhyme—above all, in
English blank verse—it is possible, in such a metre as was chosen and refashioned for this
poem, to give some sense
of the rage and rapture of battle for which Homer himself could only find
fit and full expression by similitudes drawn like mine from the revels and the terrors
and the
glories of the sea.
It is nothing to me that what I write should find immediate or general acceptance:
it is much to
know that on the whole it has won for me the right to address this dedication and
inscribe this
edition to you.
Algernon Charles Swinburne