The Columbia History of British Poetry (111 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
7.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 444
Perhaps Clough's finest poem,
Amours de Voyage
is also his most thorough exploration of the incapacitating skepticism of modern life. The poem consists of a series of letters, mostly written by Claude, a snobby, excessively contemplative self-parody of Clough. Claude falls in love, more or less ("I am in love, you say; I do not think so, exactly"), and the poem chronicles his Prufrockian failure to woo. As Clough's contemporaries frequently noted, Claude is a modern Hamlet, forever deferring commitment, incapacitated by doubting everything, even love, and even the authenticity of his inner self. Like Hamlet, he wonders if he has genuinely loved and suffered, or has merely played a role: "After all, perhaps there was something factitious about it; / I have had pain, it is true: I have wept, and so have the actors."
Amours de Voyage
epitomizes what Matthew Arnold characterized as the peculiarly modern anguish, the unending "dialogue of the mind with itself" that finds no vent in action, but leaves the overcultivated, overthoughtful protagonist trapped within his own consciousness.
The dialogue of the mind with itself is still more overtly the subject of the never-completed
Dipsychus
, a dialogue between a scrupulous protagonist, Dipsychus, and a "Spirit" who represents his tempternot exactly the devil (though named Mephistopheles) but rather the spirit of worldliness. The structure of the work enabled Clough to satirize modern customs in the worldly speeches of the Spirit, to engage in what the Spirit calls a "sarcastic" or rather "religious bitter" tone in the disillusioned speeches of Dipsychus, and also to parody once again the modern disease of ''weakness, indolence, frivolity, / Irresolution."
Like Clough, Dipsychus longs for a basis of action or belief, but always senses the inadequacy of any conception, senses "a More beyond" and so resists the closure of "a completion over-soon assumed, / Of adding up too soon." But without a positive belief, he can resist temptation only for so long before making his compromise with the world, ironically becoming nothing less than Lord Chief Justice. In its complex layering of ironies,
Dipsychus
is one of the age's most thoroughand necessarily most inconclusiverepresentations of the woes of unanchored earnestness, irresolute sense of duty, and hypercivilized morbidity of conscience.
Modern commentators cite Clough's poetry, along with Arnold's, as representative of the troubled spirit of the Victorian age, although as R. H. Hutton recognized, Clough was representative only of a certain class and temperament in his tendency to look "at all questions of the
 
Page 445
day from the thinker's point of view, and not from the people's point of view." He undoubtedly mirrored the mind of his age, but only, as William Allingham put it, "the higher mind of cultivated, all-questioning, but still conservative England." Despite his occasionally radical opinions, Clough's poetry epitomized the increasing tendency throughout the nineteenth century for poetry to become a discourse of distinctly high culture, a class discourse. Some of Clough's contemporaries found this unfortunate, but others, such as Walter Bagehot, were perfectly ready to argue on Clough's behalf that "the half-educated and busy crowd, whom we call the public'' have no right "to impose their limitations on highly educated and meditative thinkers."
Matthew Arnold's poetry is consistently associated with Clough's, even though Arnold saw Clough's poetry of doubt as the antithesis of the authoritative cultural discourse that poetry should aspire to become. But Arnold's own best poetry, like Clough's, expressed not assured truths, but anguished doubt. In repudiating "the dialogue of the mind with itself," in fact, Arnold was repudiating the poetic representation within his own
Empedocles on Etna
of the "modern problems" evident in the doubts and discouragement "of Hamlet and of Faust." But what John Addington Symonds said in 1868 of Clough's
Amours de Voyage
might also be said of Arnold's
Empedocles
. Their "vindication . . . lies in this: first that it is the poet's function to hold up a mirror to his age, as well as to lead it; and secondly, that we still admire Hamlet and Faust."
For Arnold, however, this clearly was not enough. In his letters to Clough in the late 1840s and early 1850s, he argued that modern poetry was vitiated by a "confused multitudinousness" because poets failed to "understand that they must begin with an Idea of the world in order not to be prevailed over by the world's multitudinousness." His own first publication,
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems
, however, was plainly open to the same charge. In poem after poem, Arnold explored the possibilities of an absolutely authoritative voice, but invariably with an anguished honesty that led him back to doubt. The ideal he soughtexpressed in a famous phrase from the sonnet "To a Friend"was to achieve the philosophical serenity of Sophocles, "who saw life steadily, and saw it whole." But other poems in the volume explore the absence of any possible perspective from which to obtain such a view.
In "Mycerinus," for example, the seemingly infallible voice of an oracle is shown to be wholly inconsistent with human ideas of truth and justice. Similarly, "The Sick King in Bokhara" represents the thor-
 
Page 446
oughly unified view of the world represented by Muslim law, but only to suggest that though the laws of God and man provide order, they may be inconsistent with a higher ideal of compassionate justice and with the apparent truths of human feeling. The volume even rejected the Romantic ideal of finding truth in sense of harmony with nature. "In Harmony with Nature" dismisses such Romanticism with contempt and rejects nature in terms consistent with the questioning of the gods and of law in the other poems. Nature is cruel, stubborn, fickle, unforgivingutterly alien to human compassion and conscience.
Two poems in the volume, "The Strayed Reveller" and "Resignation," explicitly explore ideas about poetic identity and authority, but both seem to raise more problems than they resolve. "The Strayed Reveller" describes two versions of visionary authoritythe vision of the gods, who calmly and indifferently view all human life from on high, and vision of "wise bards,'' who sing authoritatively only at the high cost of sharing the pains of experience. Although the way of the gods seems preferable, it is apparently humanly impossible. And the Reveller, who is often taken to be a poetic surrogate for Arnold, declines the pains of "wise bards"his own inspiration, such as it is, seems little more than a dehumanizing intoxication. Similar issues are explored in "Resignation," which repeatedly echoes Wordsworth, Arnold's most admired Romantic predecessor, but finally denies the sources of Wordsworthian authority in harmony with nature. "Resignation" offers a version of a unified poetic perspective, but only that of a rather subdued spectator who, like the indifferent gods of "The Strayed Reveller," "looks down" on the folly of human aspiration from "some high station," and who has, in a melancholy resignation, achieved objectivity by an almost inhuman detachment that enables him to "judge vain beforehand human cares."
Despite the less than rhapsodic version of the objective, detached poet as one resigned to "life's uncheer'd ways," Arnold was intent, at least for a time, on becoming just such a poet. His most ambitious poem,
Empedocles on Etna
, was evidently undertaken at first as an attempt to speak from a position of sternly authoritative objectivity. According to a friend, Arnold's initial idea was not so much to write a poem about the historical Empedocles, but rather to use the ancient poet's "name and outward circumstances . . . for the drapery of his own thoughts." His choice of Empedocles as a spokesman would enable him to speak literally from a mountaintop, but would also, as Arnold origi-
 
Page 447
nally conceived the character, enable him to speak the stark truth because of Empedocles's "refusal of limitation by the religious sentiment." Without the constraints of misguided piety, Empedocles would be able to express a "great and severe truth," the "truth of the truth." But Empedocles's central speech in the finished work, offered as a fundamental lesson in life for his companion Pausanias, indicates that his "truth" consisted only of resigned advice to his friend to "nurse no extravagant hope,'' to limit his aspirations and expectations.
Unfortunately, although he considers this advice sufficient for Pausanias, Empedocles cannot live with it himself but remains tortured by his unsatisfied longings for a larger, fuller life than mortality affords. The ineffectuality of Empedocles's speech reflected Arnold's increasing sense that rejection of the "religious sentiment" could lead only to the most and of truths, that "the service of reason is freezing to feeling, chilling to the religious mood. And feeling and the religious mood are eternally the deepest being of man, the ground of all joy and greatness for him." In the end, of course, the joyless Empedocles plunges into the mouth of the volcano.
A third character in the play, the poet Callicles, evidently represents an alternative to Empedocles's despair. His songs, sung from a lower point on the mountain, express a serene classicism and bring some measure of comfort to Empedocles, but Callicles hardly seems to offer an adequate "Idea of the world"the unified point of view of his songs is the result of an unquestioning acceptance of the "religious sentiment," an acceptance that remains undisturbed by the extraordinary cruelty of the gods described in his songs.
Empedocles on Etna
brilliantly represents the dilemma of a mid-Victorian poet attempting to reconcile the new truths of reason with the lingering need for religious faith, but because it offered no resolution, Arnold suppressed it in his 1853 volume of
Poems
, arguing in a preface that the representation of the modern "dialogue of the mind with itself" could only be morbid, painful, and therefore unpoetic. The Preface, in fact, argued consistently against the portrayal of distinctly modern problems in poetry, since poetry reflecting "an age wanting in moral grandeur," "an age of spiritual discomfort," could not be expected to affect its readers "powerfully and delightfully." In an unpoetical age, Arnold somewhat perversely insisted, the best poetry could only be written by the poet who eliminates historically conditioned subjectivity from the workthe poet will be most successful when "he most
 
Page 448
entirely succeeds in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it did in nature." Not surprisingly,
Sohrab and Rustum, Balder Dead
, and
Merope
, the poems Arnold wrote in a conscious effort to carry out his poetic program, have always struck readers as inert and lifeless.
Almost in spite of himself, it seems, Arnold's best poetry both before and after the Preface of 1853 was, like Clough's, primarily about the "spiritual discomfort" of the individual subject in an age of dizzyingly rapid transition. His beautiful, but rather sad love poems, for example, movingly describe both the great need for human love in an age where all other spiritual solace seems absentand the great difficulty of love in an age of skeptical self-questioning and spiritual alienation. The lyrics gathered together under the title "Switzerland" chronicle a brief and failed love affair that only reinforced the speaker's sense of intolerable isolation in a world where "we mortal millions live
alone
." "The Buried Life," similarly, depicts a speaker attempting to communicate fully and utterly to his beloved, but finding himself, for the most part, thwarted by the all but insurmountable difficulty of even knowing his own "hidden self,'' let alone expressing it in language. And in his most famous poem, "Dover Beach," Arnold's speaker pleads for love as the last best hope in a world represented as a "darkling plain" with "neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."
Despite his belief that the greatest poetry must offer joy, Arnold's best and most characteristic poetry expresses the pain of modern life on the darkling plain. "The Scholar-Gipsy," for example, presents a self-consciously mythic alternative to modern life in the legend of a seventeenth-century Oxford scholar who had abandoned modern life to live in pastoral simplicity, and who consequently roamed the countryside still, "exempt from age" because uninfected by the "strange disease of modern life." The legend is beautifully presented in the pastoral descriptions of the first half of the poem, but the most powerful part of the work is the account of the Victorian age, "With its sick hurry, its divided aims, / Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts." Similarly, in "Thyrsis," his pastoral elegy for Clough, Arnold attempted to find some consolation in the legend of the Scholar-Gipsy and the ideals it embodied, but the power of the poem is far less in its awkward and tentative solace than in the speaker's expression of "hope, once crush'd, less quick to spring again," and in its (somewhat ungracious) representation
 
Page 449
of Clough beaten down by the raging storms of contention in the modern world.
But perhaps the pathos of Arnold's plight as a poet seeking certainties in a world of doubt is nowhere more evident than in his "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," the poetic account of a visit to a Carthusian monastery. The certainty of Catholic faith is plainly impossible to the speaker who has been educated by the "rigorous teachers" of the nineteenth century, yet even though he regards the faith of the monks as the dead religion of a past age, he attempts to embrace it as preferable to the restless vicissitudes of life in a faithless transitional age, preferable to "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born."
For Arnold the failure of religion in the nineteenth century left unfilled a fundamental human need. As he put it in "Obermann Once More," "now the old is out of date / The new is not yet born," and no apparent way was available to fill the human "need of joy! / Yet joy whose grounds are true." Ultimately, Arnold believed, poetry must fill that void, but such poetry was impossible to write in what he persistently saw as a profoundly unpoetical age. Consequently, it is not surprising that for the last twenty-five years of his life he wrote very little poetry, but devoted himself to the literary and cultural criticism that he hoped might help to usher in a new and more poetical age. And indeed, if judged by Arnold's own announced critical standards in his late essay "The Study of Poetry," his own poetry and that of his contemporaries might well be found wanting. He argued that the "best poetry'' would take the place of religion by "forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can." This "best poetry" would constitute a secular literary canon, would express the essential and universal truths of human nature, and would therefore transcend merely historical and local concerns. But in our own age the notion of a transcendently authoritative poetry makes little sense, and we are more likely to appreciate poetry on the historical grounds that Arnold dismissed as fallacious. Ironically, Arnold seemed to realize that it was by such an estimate that his own poetry would eventually come to be appreciated. In an 1869 letter to his mother he wrote that although he lacked Tennyson's "poetical sentiment" and Robert Browning's "intellectual vigor and abundance," he would have his day because his it poems represent the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century."

Other books

Scale-Bright by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Ru by Kim Thúy
Strange is the Night by Sebastian, Justine
Adorkable by Sarra Manning
Survivor by James Phelan