the assertion that the value of the words of a poet does and ought to depend very much upon his personal character may seem, at the first glance, a violent paradox; but it is demonstrably true. a wise or tender phrase in the mouth of a byron or a moore will be despised, where a commonplace of morality or affection in that of a wordsworth or a burns is respected. if the author of don juan had said that for him “the meanest flower that blows could give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” as he would have said had it occurred to him to do so, no one would have believed him; it would have passed for a mere “poetical licence,” and would have been excused as such and forgotten. byron and wordsworth have both declared in words of similar force and beauty that the sights and sounds of nature “haunted them like a passion.” but the declara{57}tion was not consistent with what we know of byron, and it was consistent with what we know of wordsworth; and in the one case it creates a like frame of mind in the reader, while in the other it passes like a melodious wind, leaving no impression. now this mighty element of character resides, not in the poet’s active life, by which he is and ought to be socially judged; but in the spiritual consistency and integrity of his mind and heart, as it is to be inferred from the cumulative testimony of his words, which are, after all, the safest witnesses of what the man truly is. a man’s actions—although we are bound socially to judge him thereby—may belie him: his words never. out of his mouth shall the interior man be judged; for the interior man is what he heartily desires to be, however miserably he may fail to bring his external life into correspondence with his desire; and the words of the man will infallibly declare what he thus inwardly is, especially when, as in the case of the poet, the powers of language are so developed as to become the very glass of the soul, reflecting its purity and integrity, or its stains and insincerities, with a fidelity of which the writer himself is but imperfectly conscious.
to a soundly trained mind there is no surer sign of shallowness and of interior corruption than that{58} habitual predominance of form over formative energy, of splendour of language and imagery over human significance, which has so remarkably distinguished a great deal of the most widely praised poetry of the past eighty years. much of this poetry has about as much relation to actual or imaginative reality as the transformation scene of a pantomime; and much more—called “descriptive”—has so low a degree of significance and betrays so inhuman an absorption in the merest superficies of nature, that when the writer pretends to deal with those facts and phenomena of humanity which, directly or indirectly, are the main region of every true poet’s song, he has to overcome our sense that he is an habitual trifler before he can gain credit for sincerity, even when he is giving utterance to what may really be a passing strain of true poetic thought and feeling. a poet who is thus constantly occupied with the superficies of nature may probably attain to an accuracy and splendour of analytical description which has its value in its way, and which may, in certain transitory conditions of popular taste, raise him to the highest pinnacle of favour. but such poetry will be judged, in the end, by its human significance; and the writer of it will have the fatal verdict of “heartless” recorded against him—a verdict which even in the time of his favour is implicitly{59} pronounced by the indifference with which his professions of human principle and feeling are received, even by his admirers.
the slightest touch of genuine humanity is of more actual and poetic value than all that is not human which the sun shines on. the interest of what is called “descriptive” or “representative” in real poetry and all real art is always human, or, in other words, “imaginative.” a description by wordsworth, coleridge, or burns, a landscape by crome, gainsborough, or constable, is not merely nature, but nature reflected in and giving expression to a state of mind. the state of mind is the true subject, the natural phenomena the terms in which it is uttered; and there has never been a greater critical fallacy than that contained in mr. ruskin’s strictures on the “pathetic fallacy.” nature has no beauty or pathos (using the term in its widest sense) but that with which the mind invests it. without the imaginative eye it is like a flower in the dark, which is only beautiful as having in it a power of reflecting the colours of the light. the true light of nature is the human eye; and if the light of the human eye is darkness, as it is in those who see nothing but surfaces, how great is that darkness!
the saying of wordsworth concerning the poet, that{60}
you must love him ere to you
he will seem worthy of your love,
which at first reading sounds very much like nonsense, is absolutely true. he must have won your credit and confidence in his words, by proofs of habitual veracity and sincerity, before you can so receive the words which come from his heart that they will move your own. if, in the utterance of what he offers to you as the cry or the deep longing of passion, you catch him in busily noticing trifles—for which very likely he gets praised for “accurate observation of nature”—you will put him down as one who knows nothing of the passion he is pretending to express. if you detect him in the endeavour to say “fine things” in order to win your admiration for himself, instead of rendering his whole utterance a single true thing, which shall win your sympathy with the thought or feeling by which he declares himself to be dominated, the result will be the same; as also it will be if you discover that the beauty of his words is obtained rather by the labour of polish than the inward labour and true finish of passion. when, on the other hand, some familiarity with the poet’s work has assured you that, though his speech may be unequal and sometimes inadequate, it is never false; that he has always something to say, even when he fails in saying it: then you will not only{61} believe in and be moved by what he says well; but when the form is sometimes imperfect you will be carried over such passages, as over thin ice, by the formative power of passion or feeling which quickens the whole; although you would reject such passages with disgust were they found in the writing of a man in whose thoughts you know that the manner stands first and the matter second.
