CHESTERTON-VARIED TYPES - MAETERLINCK
I do not think anyone could find any fault with the way in which Mr.
Collingwood has discharged his task, except, of course, Mr. Ruskin
himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies in
passionate red ink and declared that his dear friend had selected for
admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless, and
revolting. That, however, was merely Ruskin's humour, and one of the
deepest disappointments with Mr. Collingwood is that he, like everyone
else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humourist. Yet he was a great
humourist: half the explosions which are solemnly scolded as "one-sided"
were simply meant to be one-sided, were mere laughing experiments in
language. Like a woman, he saw the humour of his own prejudices, did not
sophisticate them by logic, but deliberately exaggerated them by
rhetoric. One tenth of his paradoxes would have made the fortune of a
modern young man with gloves of an art yellow. He was as fond of
nonsense as Mr. Max Beerbohm. Only ... he was fond of other things too.
He did not ask humanity to dine on pickles.
But while his kaleidoscope of fancy and epigram gives him some kinship
with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type: he was the
last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early
Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit
above the head of his fellows. Many elements, good and bad, have
destroyed it; humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as
scepticism, have bred in us a desire to give our advice lightly and
persuasively, to mask our morality, to whisper a word and glide away.
The contrast was in some degree typified in the House of Commons under
the last leadership of Mr. Gladstone: the old order with its fist on the
box, and the new order with its feet on the table. Doubtless the wine of
that prophecy was too strong even for the strong heads that carried it.
It made Ruskin capricious and despotic, Tennyson lonely and whimsical,
Carlyle harsh to the point of hatred, and Kingsley often rabid to the
ruin of logic and charity. One alone of that race of giants, the
greatest and most neglected, was sober after the cup. No mission, no
frustration could touch with hysteria the humanity of Robert Browning.
But though Ruskin seems to close the roll of the militant prophets, we
feel how needful are such figures when we consider with what pathetic
eagerness men pay prophetic honours even to those who disclaim the
prophetic character. Ibsen declares that he only depicts life, that as
far as he is concerned there is nothing to be done, and still armies of
"Ibsenites" rally to the flag and enthusiastically do nothing. I have
found traces of a school which avowedly follows Mr. Henry James: an idea
full of humour. I like to think of a crowd with pikes and torches
shouting passages from "The Awkward Age." It is right and proper for a
multitude to declare its readiness to follow a prophet to the end of the
world, but if he himself explains, with pathetic gesticulations, that
he is only going for a walk in the park, there is not much for the
multitude to do. But the disciple of Ruskin had plenty to do. He made
roads; in his spare moments he studied the whole of geology and botany.
He lifted up paving stones and got down into early Florentine cellars,
where, by hanging upside down, he could catch a glimpse of a Cimabue
unpraisable but by divine silence. He rushed from one end of a city to
the other comparing ceilings. His limbs were weary, his clothes were
torn, and in his eyes was that unfathomable joy of life which man will
never know again until once more he takes himself seriously.
Mr. Collingwood's excellent chapters on the art criticism of Ruskin
would be better, in my opinion, if they showed more consciousness of the
after revolutions that have reversed, at least in detail, much of
Ruskin's teaching. We no longer think that art became valueless when it
was first corrupted with anatomical accuracy. But if we return to that
Raphaelism to which he was so unjust, let us not fall into the old
error of intelligent reactionaries, that of ignoring our own debt to
revolutions. Ruskin could not destroy the market of Raphaelism, but he
could and did destroy its monopoly. We may go back to the Renaissance,
but let us remember that we go back free. We can picnic now in the ruins
of our dungeon and deride our deliverer.
But neither in Mr. Collingwood's book nor in Ruskin's own delightful
"Praeterita" shall we ever get to the heart of the matter. The work of
Ruskin and his peers remains incomprehensible by the very completeness
of their victory. Fallen forever is that vast brick temple of
Utilitarianism, of which we may find the fragments but never renew the
spell. Liberal Unionists howl in its high places, and in its ruins Mr.
Lecky builds his nest. Its records read with something of the mysterious
arrogance of Chinese: hardly a generation away from us, we read of a
race who believed in the present with the same sort of servile optimism
with which the Oriental believes in the past. It may be that banging his
head against that roof for twenty years did not improve the temper of
the prophet. But he made what he praised in the old Italian
pictures--"an opening into eternity."
[2] "The Life of John Ruskin." By W.G. Collingwood. London: Methuen.
Anyone who possesses spiritual or political courage has made up his mind
to a prospect of immutable mutability; but even in a "transformation"
there is something catastrophic in the removal of the back scene. It is
a truism to say of the wise and noble lady who is gone from us that we
shall always remember her; but there is a subtler and higher compliment
still in confessing that we often forgot her. We forgot her as we forget
the sunshine, as we forget the postulates of an argument, as we commonly
forget our own existence. Mr. Gladstone is the only figure whose loss
prepared us for such earthquakes altering the landscape. But Mr.
Gladstone seemed a fixed and stationary object in our age for the same
reason that one railway train looks stationary from another; because he
and the age of progress were both travelling at the same impetuous rate
of speed. In the end, indeed, it was probably the age that dropped
behind. For a symbol of the Queen's position we must rather recur to the
image of a stretch of scenery, in which she was as a mountain so huge
and familiar that its disappearance would make the landscape round our
own door seem like a land of strangers. She had an inspired genius for
the familiarising virtues; her sympathy and sanity made us feel at home
even in an age of revolutions. That indestructible sense of security
which for good and evil is so typical of our nation, that almost
scornful optimism which, in the matter of ourselves, cannot take peril
or even decadence seriously, reached by far its highest and healthiest
form in the sense that we were watched over by one so thoroughly English
in her silence and self-control, in her shrewd trustfulness and her
brilliant inaction. Over and above those sublime laws of labour and pity
by which she ordered her life, there are a very large number of minor
intellectual matters in which we might learn a lesson from the Queen.
There is one especially which is increasingly needed in an age when
moral claims become complicated and hysterical. That Queen Victoria was
a model of political unselfishness is well known; it is less often
remarked that few modern people have an unselfishness so completely free
from morbidity, so fully capable of deciding a moral question without
exaggerating its importance. No eminent person of our time has been so
utterly devoid of that disease of self-assertion which is often rampant
among the unselfish. She had one most rare and valuable faculty, the
faculty of letting things pass--Acts of Parliament and other things. Her
predecessors, whether honest men or knaves, were attacked every now and
then with a nightmare of despotic responsibility; they suddenly
conceived that it rested with them to save the world and the Protestant
Constitution. Queen Victoria had far too much faith in the world to try
to save it. She knew that Acts of Parliament, even bad Acts of
Parliament, do not destroy nations. But she knew that ignorance,
ill-temper, tyranny, and officiousness do destroy nations, and not upon
any provocation would she set an example in these things. We fancy that
this sense of proportion, this largeness and coolness of intellectual
magnanimity is the one of the thousand virtues of Queen Victoria of
which the near future will stand most in need. We are gaining many new
mental powers, and with them new mental responsibilities. In psychology,
in sociology, above all in education, we are learning to do a great many
clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be
to learn not to do them. If that time comes, assuredly we cannot do
better than turn once more to the memory of the great Queen who for
seventy years followed through every possible tangle and distraction the
fairy thread of common sense.
We are suffering just now from an outbreak of the imagination which
exhibits itself in politics and the most unlikely places. The German
Emperor, for example, is neither a tyrant nor a lunatic, as used to be
absurdly represented; he is simply a minor poet; and he feels just as
any minor poet would feel if he found himself on the throne of
Barbarossa. The revival of militarism and ecclesiasticism is an invasion
of politics by the artistic sense; it is heraldry rather than chivalry
that is lusted after. Amid all this waving of wands and flaunting of
uniforms, all this hedonistic desire to make the most of everything,
there is something altogether quiet and splendid about the sober disdain
with which this simple and courteous lady in a black dress left idle
beside her the sceptre of a hundred tyrants. The heart of the whole
nation warmed as it had never warmed for centuries at the thought of
having in their midst a woman who cared nothing for her rights, and
nothing for those fantastic duties which are more egotistical than
rights themselves.
The work of the Queen for progressive politics has surely been greatly
underrated. She invented democratic monarchy as much as James Watt
invented the steam engine. William IV., from whom we think of her as
inheriting her Constitutional position, held in fact a position entirely
different to that which she now hands on to Edward VII. William IV. was
a limited monarch; that is to say, he had a definite, open, and
admitted power in politics, but it was a limited power. Queen Victoria
was not a limited monarch; in the only way in which she cared to be a
monarch at all she was as unlimited as Haroun Alraschid. She had
unlimited willing obedience, and unlimited social supremacy. To her
belongs the credit of inventing a new kind of monarchy; in which the
Crown, by relinquishing the whole of that political and legal department
of life which is concerned with coercion, regimentation, and punishment,
was enabled to rise above it and become the symbol of the sweeter and
purer relations of humanity, the social intercourse which leads and does
not drive. Too much cannot be said for the wise audacity and confident
completeness with which the Queen cut away all those cords of political
supremacy to which her predecessors had clung madly as the only stays of
the monarchy. She had her reward. For while William IV.'s supremacy may
be called a survival, it is not too much to say that the Queen's
supremacy might be called a prophecy. By lifting a figure purely human
over the heads of judges and warriors, we uttered in some symbolic
fashion the abiding, if unreasoning, hope which dwells in all human
hearts, that some day we may find a simpler solution of the woes of
nations than the summons and the treadmill, that we may find in some
such influence as the social influence of a woman, what was called in
the noble old language of mediaeval monarchy, "a fountain of mercy and a
fountain of honour."
In the universal reverence paid to the Queen there was hardly anywhere a
touch of snobbishness. Snobbishness, in so far as it went out towards
former sovereigns, went out to them as aristocrats rather than as kings,
as heads of that higher order of men, who were almost angels or demons
in their admitted superiority to common lines of conduct. This kind of
reverence was always a curse: nothing can be conceived as worse for the
mass of the people than that they should think the morality for which
they have to struggle an inferior morality, a thing unfitted for a
haughtier class. But of this patrician element there was hardly a trace
in the dignity of the Queen. Indeed, the degree to which the middle and
lower classes took her troubles and problems to their hearts was almost
grotesque in its familiarity. No one thought of the Queen as an
aristocrat like the Duke of Devonshire, or even as a member of the
governing classes like Mr. Chamberlain. Men thought of her as something
nearer to them even in being further off; as one who was a good queen,
and who would have been, had her fate demanded, with equal cheerfulness,
a good washerwoman. Herein lay her unexampled triumph, the greatest and
perhaps the last triumph of monarchy. Monarchy in its healthiest days
had the same basis as democracy: the belief in human nature when
entrusted with power. A king was only the first citizen who received the
franchise.
Both royalty and religion have been accused of despising humanity, and
in practice it has been too often true; but after all both the
conception of the prophet and that of the king were formed by paying
humanity the supreme compliment of selecting from it almost at random.
This daring idea that a healthy human being, when thrilled by all the
trumpets of a great trust, would rise to the situation, has often been
tested, but never with such complete success as in the case of our dead
Queen. On her was piled the crushing load of a vast and mystical
tradition, and she stood up straight under it. Heralds proclaimed her as
the anointed of God, and it did not seem presumptuous. Brave men died in
thousands shouting her name, and it did not seem unnatural. No mere
intellect, no mere worldly success could, in this age of bold inquiry,
have sustained that tremendous claim; long ago we should have stricken
Caesar and dethroned Napoleon. But these glories and these sacrifices did
not seem too much to celebrate a hardworking human nature; they were
possible because at the heart of our Empire was nothing but a defiant
humility. If the Queen had stood for any novel or fantastic imperial
claims, the whole would have seemed a nightmare; the whole was
successful because she stood, and no one could deny that she stood, for
the humblest, the shortest and the most indestructible of human gospels,
that when all troubles and troublemongers have had their say, our work
can be done till sunset, our life can be lived till death.
The list of the really serious, the really convinced, the really
important and comprehensible people now alive includes, as most
Englishmen would now be prepared to admit, the German Emperor. He is a
practical man and a poet. I do not know whether there are still people
in existence who think there is some kind of faint antithesis between
these two characters; but I incline to think there must be, because of
the surprise which the career of the German Emperor has generally
evoked. When he came to the throne it became at once apparent that he
was poetical; people assumed in consequence that he was unpractical;
that he would plunge Europe into war, that he would try to annex France,
that he would say he was the Emperor of Russia, that he would stand on
his head in the Reichstag, that he would become a pirate on the Spanish
Main. Years upon years have passed; he has gone on making speeches, he
has gone on talking about God and his sword, he has poured out an ever
increased rhetoric and aestheticism. And yet all the time people have
slowly and surely realised that he knows what he is about, that he is
one of the best friends of peace, that his influence on Europe is not
only successful, but in many ways good, that he knows what world he is
living in better than a score of materialists.
The explanation never comes to them--he is a poet; therefore, a
practical man. The affinity of the two words, merely as words, is much
nearer than many people suppose, for the matter of that. There is one
Greek word for "I do" from which we get the word practical, and another
Greek word for "I do" from which we get the word poet. I was doubtless
once informed of a profound difference between the two, but I have
forgotten it. The two words practical and poetical may mean two subtly
different things in that old and subtle language, but they mean the same
in English and the same in the long run. It is ridiculous to suppose
that the man who can understand the inmost intricacies of a human being
who has never existed at all cannot make a guess at the conduct of man
who lives next door. It is idle to say that a man who has himself felt
the mad longing under the mad moon for a vagabond life cannot know why
his son runs away to sea. It is idle to say that a man who has himself
felt the hunger for any kind of exhilaration, from angel or devil,
cannot know why his butler takes to drink. It is idle to say that a man
who has been fascinated with the wild fastidiousness of destiny does not
know why stockbrokers gamble, to say that a man who has been knocked
into the middle of eternal life by a face in a crowd does not know why
the poor marry young; that a man who found his path to all things kindly
and pleasant blackened and barred suddenly by the body of a man does not
know what it is to desire murder. It is idle, in short, for a man who
has created men to say that he does not understand them. A man who is a
poet may, of course, easily make mistakes in these personal and
practical relations; such mistakes and similar ones have been made by
poets; such mistakes and greater ones have been made by soldiers and
statesmen and men of business. But in so far as a poet is in these
things less of a practical man he is also less of a poet.
If Shakespeare really married a bad wife when he had conceived the
character of Beatrice he ought to have been ashamed of himself: he had
failed not only in his life, he had failed in his art. If Balzac got
into rows with his publishers he ought to be rebuked and not
commiserated, having evolved so many consistent business men from his
own inside. The German Emperor is a poet, and therefore he succeeds,
because poetry is so much nearer to reality than all the other human
occupations. He is a poet, and succeeds because the majority of men are
poets. It is true, if that matter is at all important, that the German
Emperor is not a good poet. The majority of men are poets, only they
happen to be bad poets. The German Emperor fails ridiculously, if that
is all that is in question, in almost every one of the artistic
occupations to which he addresses himself: he is neither a first-rate
critic, nor a first-rate musician, nor a first-rate painter, nor a
first-rate poet. He is a twelfth-rate poet, but because he is a poet at
all he knocks to pieces all the first-rate politicians in the war of
politics.
Having made clear my position so far, I discover with a certain amount
of interest that I have not yet got to the subject of these remarks. The
German Emperor is a poet, and although, as far as I know, every line he
ever wrote may be nonsense, he is a poet in this real sense, that he has
realised the meaning of every function he has performed. Why should we
jeer at him because he has a great many uniforms, for instance? The very
essence of the really imaginative man is that he realises the various
types or capacities in which he can appear. Every one of us, or almost
every one of us, does in reality fulfil almost as many offices as
Pooh-Bah. Almost every one of us is a ratepayer, an immortal soul, an
Englishman, a baptised person, a mammal, a minor poet, a juryman, a
married man, a bicyclist, a Christian, a purchaser of newspapers, and a
critic of Mr. Alfred Austin. We ought to have uniforms for all these
things. How beautiful it would be if we appeared to-morrow in the
uniform of a ratepayer, in brown and green, with buttons made in the
shape of coins, and a blue income-tax paper tastefully arranged as a
favour; or, again, if we appeared dressed as immortal souls, in a blue
uniform with stars. It would be very exciting to dress up as Englishmen,
or to go to a fancy dress ball as Christians.
Some of the costumes I have suggested might appear a little more
difficult to carry out. The dress of a person who purchases newspapers
(though it mostly consists of coloured evening editions arranged in a
stiff skirt, like that of a saltatrice, round the waist of the wearer)
has many mysterious points. The attire of a person prepared to criticise
the Poet Laureate is something so awful and striking that I dare not
even begin to describe it; the one fact which I am willing to reveal,
and to state seriously and responsibly, is that it buttons up behind.
But most assuredly we ought not to abuse the Kaiser because he is fond
of putting on all his uniforms; he does so because he has a large number
of established and involuntary incarnations. He tries to do his duty in
that state of life to which it shall please God to call him; and it so
happens that he has been called to as many different estates as there
are regiments in the German Army. He is a huntsman and proud of being a
huntsman, an engineer and proud of being an engineer, an infantry
soldier and proud of being so, a light horseman and proud of being so.
There is nothing wrong in all this; the only wrong thing is that it
should be confined to the merely destructive arts of war. The sight of
the German Kaiser in the most magnificent of the uniforms in which he
had led armies to victory is not in itself so splendid or delightful as
that of many other sights which might come before us without a whisper
of the alarms of war. It is not so splendid or delightful as the sight
of an ordinary householder showing himself in that magnificent uniform
of purple and silver which should signalise the father of three
children. It is not so splendid or delightful as the appearance of a
young clerk in an insurance office decorated with those three long
crimson plumes which are the well-known insignia of a gentleman who is
just engaged to be married. Nor can it compare with the look of a man
wearing the magnificent green and silver armour by which we know one who
has induced an acquaintance to give up getting drunk, or the blue and
gold which is only accorded to persons who have prevented fights in the
street. We belong to quite as many regiments as the German Kaiser. Our
regiments are regiments that are embattled everywhere; they fight an
unending fight against all that is hopeless and rapacious and of evil
report. The only difference is that we have the regiments, but not the
uniforms.
Only one obvious point occurs to me to add. If the Kaiser has more than
any other man the sense of the poetry of the ancient things, the sword,
the crown, the ship, the nation, he has the sense of the poetry of
modern things also. He has one sense, and it is even a joke against
him. He feels the poetry of one thing that is more poetic than sword or
crown or ship or nation, the poetry of the telegram. No one ever sent a
telegram who did not feel like a god. He is a god, for he is a minor
poet; a minor poet, but a poet still.
Mr. Morton Luce has written a short study of Tennyson which has
considerable cultivation and suggestiveness, which will be sufficient to
serve as a notebook for Tennyson's admirers, but scarcely sufficient,
perhaps, to serve as a pamphlet against his opponents. If a critic has,
as he ought to have, any of the functions anciently attributed to a
prophet, it ought not to be difficult for him to prophesy that Tennyson
will pass through a period of facile condemnation and neglect before we
arrive at the true appreciation of his work. The same thing has happened
to the most vigorous of essayists, Macaulay, and the most vigorous of
romancers, Dickens, because we live in a time when mere vigour is
considered a vulgar thing. The same idle and frigid reaction will almost
certainly discredit the stateliness and care of Tennyson, as it has
discredited the recklessness and inventiveness of Dickens. It is only
necessary to remember that no action can be discredited by a reaction.
The attempts which have been made to discredit the poetical position of
Tennyson are in the main dictated by an entire misunderstanding of the
nature of poetry. When critics like Matthew Arnold, for example, suggest
that his poetry is deficient in elaborate thought, they only prove, as
Matthew Arnold proved, that they themselves could never be great poets.
It is no valid accusation against a poet that the sentiment he expresses
is commonplace. Poetry is always commonplace; it is vulgar in the
noblest sense of that noble word. Unless a man can make the same kind of
ringing appeal to absolute and admitted sentiments that is made by a
popular orator, he has lost touch with emotional literature. Unless he
is to some extent a demagogue, he cannot be a poet. A man who expresses
in poetry new and strange and undiscovered emotions is not a poet; he is
a brain specialist. Tennyson can never be discredited before any serious
tribunal of criticism because the sentiments and thoughts to which he
dedicates himself are those sentiments and thoughts which occur to
anyone. These are the peculiar province of poetry; poetry, like
religion, is always a democratic thing, even if it pretends the
contrary. The faults of Tennyson, so far as they existed, were not half
so much in the common character of his sentiments as in the arrogant
perfection of his workmanship. He was not by any means so wrong in his
faults as he was in his perfections.
Men are very much too ready to speak of men's work being ordinary, when
we consider that, properly considered, every man is extraordinary. The
average man is a tribal fable, like the Man-Wolf or the Wise Man of the
Stoics. In every man's heart there is a revolution; how much more in
every poet's? The supreme business of criticism is to discover that part
of a man's work which is his and to ignore that part which belongs to
others. Why should any critic of poetry spend time and attention on that
part of a man's work which is unpoetical? Why should any man be
interested in aspects which are uninteresting? The business of a critic
is to discover the importance of men and not their crimes. It is true
that the Greek word critic carries with it the meaning of a judge, and
up to this point of history judges have had to do with the valuation of
men's sins, and not with the valuation of their virtues.
Tennyson's work, disencumbered of all that uninteresting accretion which
he had inherited or copied, resolves itself, like that of any other man
of genius, into those things which he really inaugurated. Underneath all
his exterior of polished and polite rectitude there was in him a genuine
fire of novelty; only that, like all the able men of his period, he
disguised revolution under the name of evolution. He is only a very
shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the
Conservative.
Tennyson had certain absolutely personal ideas, as much his own as the
ideas of Browning or Meredith, though they were fewer in number. One of
these, for example, was the fact that he was the first of all poets (and
perhaps the last) to attempt to treat poetically that vast and monstrous
vision of fact which science had recently revealed to mankind.
Scientific discoveries seem commonly fables as fantastic in the ears of
poets as poems in the ears of men of science. The poet is always a
Ptolemaist; for him the sun still rises and the earth stands still.
Tennyson really worked the essence of modern science into his poetical
constitution, so that its appalling birds and frightful flowers were
really part of his literary imagery. To him blind and brutal monsters,
the products of the wild babyhood of the Universe, were as the daisies
and the nightingales were to Keats; he absolutely realised the great
literary paradox mentioned in the Book of Job: "He saw Behemoth, and he
played with him as with a bird."
Instances of this would not be difficult to find. But the tests of
poetry are those instances in which this outrageous scientific
phraseology becomes natural and unconscious. Tennyson wrote one of his
own exquisite lyrics describing the exultation of a lover on the evening
before his bridal day. This would be an occasion, if ever there was one,
for falling back on those ancient and assured falsehoods of the domed
heaven and the flat earth in which generations of poets have made us
feel at home. We can imagine the poet in such a lyric saluting the
setting sun and prophesying the sun's resurrection. There is something
extraordinarily typical of Tennyson's scientific faith in the fact that
this, one of the most sentimental and elemental of his poems, opens with
the two lines:
"Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow."
Rivers had often been commanded to flow by poets, and flowers to blossom
in their season, and both were doubtless grateful for the permission.
But the terrestrial globe of science has only twice, so far as we know,
been encouraged in poetry to continue its course, one instance being
that of this poem, and the other the incomparable "Address to the
Terrestrial Globe" in the "Bab Ballads."
There was, again, another poetic element entirely peculiar to Tennyson,
which his critics have, in many cases, ridiculously confused with a
fault. This was the fact that Tennyson stood alone among modern poets
in the attempt to give a poetic character to the conception of Liberal
Conservatism, of splendid compromise. The carping critics who have
abused Tennyson for this do not see that it was far more daring and
original for a poet to defend conventionality than to defend a cart-load
of revolutions. His really sound and essential conception of Liberty,
"Turning to scorn with lips divine
The falsehood of extremes,"
is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in
the Liberal century. Moderation is not a compromise; moderation is a
passion; the passion of great judges. That Tennyson felt that lyrical
enthusiasm could be devoted to established customs, to indefensible and
ineradicable national constitutions, to the dignity of time and the
empire of unutterable common sense, all this did not make him a tamer
poet, but an infinitely more original one. Any poetaster can describe a
thunderstorm; it requires a poet to describe the ancient and quiet sky.
I cannot, indeed, fall in with Mr. Morton Luce in his somewhat frigid
and patrician theory of poetry. "Dialect," he says, "mostly falls below
the dignity of art." I cannot feel myself that art has any dignity
higher than the indwelling and divine dignity of human nature. Great
poets like Burns were far more undignified when they clothed their
thoughts in what Mr. Morton Luce calls "the seemly raiment of cultured
speech" than when they clothed them in the headlong and flexible patois
in which they thought and prayed and quarrelled and made love. If
Tennyson failed (which I do not admit) in such poems as "The Northern
Farmer," it was not because he used too much of the spirit of the
dialect, but because he used too little.
Tennyson belonged undoubtedly to a period from which we are divided; the
period in which men had queer ideas of the antagonism of science and
religion; the period in which the Missing Link was really missing. But
his hold upon the old realities of existence never wavered; he was the
apostle of the sanctity of laws, of the sanctity of customs; above all,
like every poet, he was the apostle of the sanctity of words.
CHESTERTON-VARIED TYPES - MAETERLINCK