I

LECTURE V

POETIC PERSONALITY. THE POET

HIMSELF

§ 1

HAVE never professed, in these lectures, to make great poetry into a species of poetry There are, as I have said, infinite degrees of greatness; if we could set up any kind of a scale for poetry in respect of it, we should never be able to mark exactly where greatness begins, any more than we can draw the line on the thermometer where heat begins. But put your hand into hot water, and you know it is hot, right enough; enter into great poetry, and you feel, just as unmistakably, the greatness. The analysis of this feeling which I have been attempting has been designed to show that we can, nevertheless, say with some precision what it is we are acknowledging when we admit the greatness of poetry; and that, in consequence, we can also say, without pretending to anything so futile as a nice measurement of greatness, why some poems strike us as greater than others. (Poetry being always a harmony of experience, its greatness will depend both on the scope and variety of the experience, and on the completeness and intensity of the harmony of this. Prometheus Unbound is not so great a poem as Paradise Lost, because the ex

perience Shelley made into his poem has neither the scope nor the variety of Milton's. But neither is Faust as great a poem as Paradise Lost, though the range of Goethe's matter is not unequal to, and not altogether unlike, Milton's; the thing here is, that Goethe could effect nothing like Milton's harmony. For Milton centred his harmony deep in the peculiarly personal life of a character; Goethe's harmony began as a character, slackened into the easier harmony of an idea, and then dissipated into the mere juxtaposition of variety.

There are some poems which the world seems agreed to place in a class above all others, so far as greatness is concerned. They may not be above all others in the scope of their experience-not decisively, at any rate; for once that can be taken as fairly and fully representative of the whole fact of life, its sorrow and its joy, its power and its ruin, we have reached a height which will not be notably affected by more or less detail in the substantiation. There is still, however, the possibility of a further and decisive step upward towards supreme greatness; and we found that this step upward is taken when the poet's art raises the harmony of its matter to the highest degree of command and intensity, by making it live in our minds as the personality of a character manifestly symbolic-a Satan, an Achilles, a Hamlet. We saw also why this personified harmony must have such a superiority of command over our minds and such an intensity of concentration. For no mere idea can excite us so profoundly, or draw us to live in it so keenly, as the fortune of a character whose similarity to our

selves cannot but provoke our sympathy; and there can be no such unification of diversity-yes, and of opposites and contradictions-as that mysterious, not-to-beformulated power of personality can effect, simply by uttering these diverse things out of the depth of its fund of nameless power, and thereby charging them all, however they may differ, with the unique savour of its quality: thus giving us underneath our sense of diversity, and even of contradiction, a still deeper sense of connexion-the sense, namely, of an originating personal life.

But so far I have simply taken for granted the fact of this symbolic characterisation. How a poet can create an imaginary character in our minds—and a character which is not only absolutely individual but at the same time a symbol of the poet's intention-is a question we should, perhaps, leave to the psychologists. Is it due to the poet's observation of life? But observation will not give us a Macbeth, any more than a Satan. Is it then the poet expressing himself? But Milton is not Satan; and if Shakespeare is Macbeth, how can he be also his other characters-Cleopatra and Benedick, Isabella and Prospero? We find a similar problem in the art of landskip. If it is merely observation, it is nothing; but, in the nature of it, it is something else than the artist himself. If we cannot expect to meet with Falstaffs and Hamlets in actual life, neither can we expect to see in the open air what Turner or Crome put on canvas: the artist is there, as well as the scene of the earth.

So with poetic characterisation. The poet has lived in the world of men, and has come to know that world. through and through, delighting in it. But his observation comes to us completely impregnated by his peculiar spirit and by the purpose of his art. Observation will never account for creation; it will not even account for the materials of creation, unless we take it in a sense large enough to include introspection. Milton is neither Satan nor Christ; but it was almost wholly on his knowledge of himself that he drew for the materials out of which he created the characters of Satan and Christ. It may, indeed, be said, and justly, that observation itself is always in some sort creative; for it does not merely consist in noticing traits of behaviour, it goes on to the distinctly imaginative act, not merely of combining them (which would be nothing), but of supposing a character capable of producing such behaviour. Even so, this imaginative character-drawing which we call observation of life is conditioned solely by what we know. The poet's character-drawing, however, is conditioned not only by what he knows, but also by what he requires-for the accomplishment of an artistic purpose to which all his characterization is subordinate. Realism is not the standard by which we can judge of his success; and when we say that his charac ters are true to life, all we mean is that they are intelligible. And intelligible they must be, if they are to serve his purpose; they must be characters into whose thoughts and moods and actions we can readily enter, and feel them as our own. But if they are intelligible,

we do not trouble to ask whether they are true to life in the realistic sense; we are not disturbed by the fact that every moment of their speech and language is distinctly significant a thing we scarcely find in the persons of actual life: nor that these imaginary characters, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, continually reveal the very inmost secrets of their beings and their deep reaction to the events and persons round about them: nor-and this is equally unlike what actually happens that they are presented to us absolutely and wholly conditioned by one single process of things, altogether concerned in that and in that only. In a word, our belief in these characters is not in the least affected by the fact that they, their thoughts and feelings and personalities, are as much the expressive technique of the poet's purpose as his phrases and his rhythms.

But what do we mean by the personality of a fictitious character? What gives us the sense of a personality existing in its own right-and not merely the poet'sin an imaginary spectacle of human behaviour? The poet, we must remember, is severely limited in the means of his art; he works, moreover, under the strict self-imposed conditions of his artistic purpose; and yet he compels us to imagine a series of thoughts, feelings, actions, in such a way that an individual person, and an apparently independent person, comes into life within them, as convincingly as if he had actually lived before us with all the freedom and infinite subtlety of real acquaintance. How is it done? We talk, rather portentously, of analysis and psychology in poetry. But