AESTHETIC POETRY+ WALTER HORATIO PATER [213] THE "aesthetic" poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greekor medieval poetry, nor only an idealisation of modern life andsentiment. The atmosphere on which its effect depends belongs to nosimple form of poetry, no actual form of life. Greek poetry, medieval or modern poetry, projects, above the realities of its time, a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of thattransfigured world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimatesbeyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literallyan artificial or "earthly paradise. " It is a finer ideal, extractedfrom what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal. Likesome strange second flowering after date, it renews on a moredelicate type the poetry of a past age, but must not be confoundedwith it. The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion ofhome-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense ofescape, which no actual form of life [214] satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous. The writings of the "romantic school, " of which the aesthetic poetryis an afterthought, mark a transition not so much from the pagan tothe medieval ideal, as from a lower to a higher degree of passion inliterature. The end of the eighteenth century, swept by vastdisturbing currents, experienced an excitement of spirit of which onenote was a reaction against an outworn classicism severed not morefrom nature than from the genuine motives of ancient art; and areturn to true Hellenism was as much a part of this reaction as thesudden preoccupation with things medieval. The medieval tendency isin Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, the Hellenic in his Iphigenie. At first this medievalism was superficial, or at least external. Adventure, romance in the frankest sense, grotesque individualism--thatis one element in medieval poetry, and with it alone Scott andGoethe dealt. Beyond them were the two other elements of themedieval spirit: its mystic religion at its apex in Dante and SaintLouis, and its mystic passion, passing here and there into the greatromantic loves of rebellious flesh, of Lancelot and Abelard. Thatstricter, imaginative medievalism which re-creates the mind of theMiddle Age, so that the form, the presentment grows outward [215]from within, came later with Victor Hugo in France, with Heine inGermany. In the Defence of Guenevere: and Other Poems, published by Mr. William Morris now many years ago, the first typical specimen ofaesthetic poetry, we have a refinement upon this later, profoundermedievalism. The poem which gives its name to the volume is a thingtormented and awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere defendingherself from the charge of adultery, and the accent falls in strange, unwonted places with the effect of a great cry. In truth theseArthurian legends, in their origin prior to Christianity, yield alltheir sweetness only in a Christian atmosphere. What ischaracteristic in them is the strange suggestion of a deliberatechoice between Christ and a rival lover. That religion, monasticreligion at any rate, has its sensuous side, a dangerously sensuousside, has been often seen: it is the experience of Rousseau as wellas of the Christian mystics. The Christianity of the Middle Age madeway among a people whose loss was in the life of the senses partly byits aesthetic beauty, a thing so profoundly felt by the Latinhymn-writers, who for one moral or spiritual sentiment have a hundredsensuous images. And so in those imaginative loves, in their highestexpression, the Provencal poetry, it is a rival religion with a [216]new rival cultus that we see. Coloured through and through withChristian sentiment, they are rebels against it. The rejection ofone worship for another is never lost sight of. The jealousy of thatother lover, for whom these words and images and refined ways ofsentiment were first devised, is the secret here of a borrowed, perhaps factitious colour and heat. It is the mood of the cloistertaking a new direction, and winning so a later space of life it neveranticipated. Hereon, as before in the cloister, so now in the chateau, the reignof reverie set in. The devotion of the cloister knew that moodthoroughly, and had sounded all its stops. For the object of thisdevotion was absent or veiled, not limited to one supreme plasticform like Zeus at Olympia or Athena in the Acropolis, but distracted, as in a fever dream, into a thousand symbols and reflections. Butthen, the Church, that new Sibyl, had a thousand secrets to make theabsent near. Into this kingdom of reverie, and with it into aparadise of ambitious refinements, the earthly love enters, andbecomes a prolonged somnambulism. Of religion it learns the art ofdirecting towards an unseen object sentiments whose natural directionis towards objects of sense. Hence a love defined by the absence ofthe beloved, choosing to be without hope, protesting [217] againstall lower uses of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian. It is thelove which is incompatible with marriage, for the chevalier who nevercomes, of the serf for the chatelaine, of the rose for thenightingale, of Rudel for the Lady of Tripoli. Another element ofextravagance came in with the feudal spirit: Provencal love is fullof the very forms of vassalage. To be the servant of love, to haveoffended, to taste the subtle luxury of chastisement, ofreconciliation--the religious spirit, too, knows that, and meets justthere, as in Rousseau, the delicacies of the earthly love. Here, under this strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air, exotic flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote andunaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the lightalmost shining through them. Surely, such loves were too fragile andadventurous to last more than for a moment. That monastic religion of the Middle Age was, in fact, in many of itsbearings, like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses: and areligion which is a disorder of the senses must always be subject toillusions. Reverie, illusion, delirium: they are the three stages ofa fatal descent both in the religion and the loves of the Middle Age. Nowhere has the impression of this delirium been conveyed as byVictor Hugo in Notre Dame de Paris. The [218] strangest creations ofsleep seem here, by some appalling licence, to cross the limit of thedawn. The English poet too has learned the secret. He has diffusedthrough King Arthur's Tomb the maddening white glare of the sun, andtyranny of the moon, not tender and far-off, but close down--thesorcerer's moon, large and feverish. The colouring is intricate anddelirious, as of "scarlet lilies. " The influence of summer is like apoison in one's blood, with a sudden bewildered sickening of life andall things. In Galahad: a Mystery, the frost of Christmas night onthe chapel stones acts as a strong narcotic: a sudden shrill ringingpierces through the numbness: a voice proclaims that the Grail hasgone forth through the great forest. It is in the Blue Closet thatthis delirium reaches its height with a singular beauty, reservedperhaps for the enjoyment of the few. A passion of which the outlets are sealed, begets a tension of nerve, in which the sensible world comes to one with a reinforced brilliancyand relief--all redness is turned into blood, all water into tears. Hence a wild, convulsed sensuousness in the poetry of the Middle Age, in which the things of nature begin to play a strange delirious part. Of the things of nature the medieval mind had a deep sense; but itssense of them was not objective, no real escape [219] to the worldwithout us. The aspects and motions of nature only reinforced itsprevailing mood, and were in conspiracy with one's own brain againstone. A single sentiment invaded the world: everything was infusedwith a motive drawn from the soul. The amorous poetry of Provence, making the starling and the swallow its messengers, illustrates thewhole attitude of nature in this electric atmosphere, bent as bymiracle or magic to the service of human passion. The most popular and gracious form of Provencal poetry was thenocturn, sung by the lover at night at the door or under the windowof his mistress. These songs were of different kinds, according tothe hour at which they were intended to be sung. Some were to besung at midnight--songs inviting to sleep, the serena, or serenade;others at break of day--waking songs, the aube or aubade. * Thiswaking-song is put sometimes into the mouth of a comrade of thelover, who plays sentinel during the night, to watch for and announcethe dawn: sometimes into the mouth of one of the lovers, who areabout to separate. A modification of it is familiar to us all inRomeo and Juliet, where the lovers debate whether the song they hearis of the nightingale or the lark; the aubade, with the two othergreat forms of love-poetry then floating in the world, the sonnet andthe [220] epithalamium, being here refined, heightened, and inwoveninto the structure of the play. Those, in whom what Rousseau callsles frayeurs nocturnes are constitutional, know what splendour theygive to the things of the morning; and how there comes something ofrelief from physical pain with the first white film in the sky. TheMiddle Age knew those terrors in all their forms; and these songs ofthe morning win hence a strange tenderness and effect. The crown ofthe English poet's book is one of these appreciations of the dawn:-- "Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips, Think but one thought of me up in the stars, The summer-night waneth, the morning light slips, Faint and gray 'twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud-bars, That are patiently waiting there for the dawn: Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold Waits to float through them along with the sun. Far out in the meadows, above the young corn, The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun; Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn, Round the lone house in the midst of the corn. Speak but one word to me over the corn, Over the tender, bow'd locks of the corn. " It is the very soul of the bridegroom which goes forth to the bride:inanimate things are longing with him: all the sweetness of theimaginative loves [221] of the Middle Age, with a superaddedspirituality of touch all its own, is in that! The Defence of Guenevere was published in 1858; the Life and Death ofJason in 1867; to be followed by The Earthly Paradise; and the changeof manner wrought in the interval, entire, almost a revolt, ischaracteristic of the aesthetic poetry. Here there is no delirium orillusion, no experiences of mere soul while the body and the bodilysenses sleep, or wake with convulsed intensity at the prompting ofimaginative love; but rather the great primary passions under broaddaylight as of the pagan Veronese. This simplification interests us, not merely for the sake of an individual poet--full of charm as heis--but chiefly because it explains through him a transition which, under many forms, is one law of the life of the human spirit, and ofwhich what we call the Renaissance is only a supreme instance. Justso the monk in his cloister, through the "open vision, " open only tothe spirit, divined, aspired to, and at last apprehended, a betterdaylight, but earthly, open only to the senses. Complex and subtleinterests, which the mind spins for itself may occupy art and poetryor our own spirits for a time; but sooner or later they come backwith a sharp rebound to the simple elementary passions--anger, desire, regret, [222] pity, and fear: and what corresponds to them inthe sensuous world--bare, abstract fire, water, air, tears, sleep, silence, and what De Quincey has called the "glory of motion. " This reaction from dreamlight to daylight gives, as always happens, astrange power in dealing with morning and the things of the morning. Not less is this Hellenist of the Middle Age master of dreams, ofsleep and the desire of sleep--sleep in which no one walks, restorerof childhood to men--dreams, not like Galahad's or Guenevere's, butfull of happy, childish wonder as in the earlier world. It is aworld in which the centaur and the ram with the fleece of gold areconceivable. The song sung always claims to be sung for the firsttime. There are hints at a language common to birds and beasts andmen. Everywhere there is an impression of surprise, as of peoplefirst waking from the golden age, at fire, snow, wine, the touch ofwater as one swims, the salt taste of the sea. And this simplicityat first hand is a strange contrast to the sought-out simplicity ofWordsworth. Desire here is towards the body of nature for its ownsake, not because a soul is divined through it. And yet it is one of the charming anachronisms of a poet, who, whilehe handles an ancient subject, never becomes an antiquarian, butanimates his [223] subject by keeping it always close to himself, that betweenwhiles we have a sense of English scenery as from an eyewell practised under Wordsworth's influence, as from "the casementhalf opened on summer-nights, " with the song of the brown bird amongthe willows, the "Noise of bells, such as in moonlit lanes Rings from the grey team on the market night. " Nowhere but in England is there such a "paradise of birds, " thefern-owl, the water-hen, the thrush in a hundred sweet variations, theger-falcon, the kestrel, the starling, the pea-fowl; birds heard fromthe field by the townsman down in the streets at dawn; doveseverywhere, pink-footed, grey-winged, flitting about the temple, troubled by the temple incense, trapped in the snow. The sea-touchesare not less sharp and firm, surest of effect in places where riverand sea, salt and fresh waves, conflict. In handling a subject of Greek legend, anything in the way of anactual revival must always be impossible. Such vain antiquarianismin a waste of the poet's power. The composite experience of all theages is part of each one of us: to deduct from that experience, toobliterate any part of it, to come face to face with the people of apast age, as if the Middle Age, the Renaissance, the eighteenthcentury had not been, is as impossible as to become a little [224]child, or enter again into the womb and be born. But though it isnot possible to repress a single phase of that humanity, which, because we live and move and have our being in the life of humanity, makes us what we are, it is possible to isolate such a phase, tothrow it into relief, to be divided against ourselves in zeal for it;as we may hark back to some choice space of our own individual life. We cannot truly conceive the age: we can conceive the element it hascontributed to our culture: we can treat the subjects of the agebringing that into relief. Such an attitude towards Greece, aspiringto but never actually reaching its way of conceiving life, is what ispossible for art. The modern poet or artist who treats in this way a classical storycomes very near, if not to the Hellenism of Homer, yet to theHellenism of Chaucer, the Hellenism of the Middle Age, or rather ofthat exquisite first period of the Renaissance within it. Afterwardsthe Renaissance takes its side, becomes, perhaps, exaggerated orfacile. But the choice life of the human spirit is always undermixed lights, and in mixed situations, when it is not too sure ofitself, is still expectant, girt up to leap forward to the promise. Such a situation there was in that earliest return from theoverwrought spiritualities of the Middle Age to the earlier, moreancient life of the senses; and for us the most attractive form of[225] classical story is the monk's conception of it, when he escapesfrom the sombre atmosphere of his cloister to natural light. Thefruits of this mood, which, divining more than it understands, infuses into the scenery and figures of Christian history some subtlereminiscence of older gods, or into the story of Cupid and Psychethat passionate stress of spirit which the world owes toChristianity, constitute a peculiar vein of interest in the art ofthe fifteenth century. And so, before we leave Jason and The Earthly Paradise, a word mustbe said about their medievalisms, delicate inconsistencies, which, coming in a poem of Greek subject, bring into this white dawnthoughts of the delirious night just over and make one's sense ofrelief deeper. The opening of the fourth book of Jason describes theembarkation of the Argonauts: as in a dream, the scene shifts and wego down from Iolchos to the sea through a pageant of the Middle Agein some French or Italian town. The gilded vanes on the spires, thebells ringing in the towers, the trellis of roses at the window, theclose planted with apple-trees, the grotesque undercroft with itsclose-set pillars, change by a single touch the air of these Greekcities and we are at Glastonbury by the tomb of Arthur. The nymph infurred raiment who seduces Hylas is conceived frankly in the spiritof Teutonic romance; her song is of a garden [226] enclosed, such asthat with which the old church glass-stainer surrounds the mysticbride of the song of songs. Medea herself has a hundred touches ofthe medieval sorceress, the sorceress of the Streckelberg or theBlocksberg: her mystic changes are Christabel's. It is preciselythis effect, this grace of Hellenism relieved against the sorrow ofthe Middle Age, which forms the chief motives of The EarthlyParadise: with an exquisite dexterity the two threads of sentimentare here interwoven and contrasted. A band of adventurers sets outfrom Norway, most northerly of northern lands, where the plague israging--the bell continually ringing as they carry the Sacrament tothe sick. Even in Mr. Morris's earliest poems snatches of the sweetFrench tongue had always come with something of Hellenic blithenessand grace. And now it is below the very coast of France, through thefleet of Edward the Third, among the gaily painted medieval sails, that we pass to a reserved fragment of Greece, which by some divinegood fortune lingers on in the western sea into the Middle Age. There the stories of The Earthly Paradise are told, Greek story andromantic alternating; and for the crew of the Rose Garland, comingacross the sins of the earlier world with the sign of the cross, anddrinking Rhine-wine in Greece, the two worlds of sentiment areconfronted. [227] One characteristic of the pagan spirit the aesthetic poetryhas, which is on its surface--the continual suggestion, pensive orpassionate, of the shortness of life. This is contrasted with thebloom of the world, and gives new seduction to it--the sense of deathand the desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickened by the senseof death. But that complexion of sentiment is at its height inanother "aesthetic" poet of whom I have to speak next, Dante GabrielRossetti. 1868. NOTES 213. +This essay appeared only in the 1889 edition of Appreciations. 219. *Fauriel's Histoire de la Poesie Provencale, tome ii. Ch. Xviii.