Читать книгу The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry - Austin Alfred - Страница 4

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Women, to whom a barbarous description, willingly accepted by themselves, has been applied, have recently been much in the public eye, and still more in the public prints. But I should not class them under the designation of feminine; and, though they may have invaded prose fiction, they have not been, and I think they never will be, met with in Poetry. They are noisy, but numerically weak. Eve listening to the Tempter, then bewailing her weakness; Ruth amid the alien corn; Magdalen and her box of spikenard; Helen of Troy following evil-hearted Paris; Beatrice in heaven; Una and the milk-white lamb; Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It; the Lily Maid of Astolat in the Idylls of the King—these are women of whom, or, at least, of the sentiments and sympathies of whom, as manifested in English poetry, I wish to speak. The most progressive age one can possibly conceive will never succeed in leaving human nature behind, and I have not the smallest doubt that women will continue to be womanly to the end of time.

What, then, is feminine as contrasted with masculine? what is womanly as compared with manly, whether in literature or in life? Men and women have many qualities in common, and resemble more than they differ from each other. But while, speaking generally, the man’s main occupations lie abroad, the woman’s main occupation is at home. He has to deal with public and collective interests; she has to do with private and individual interests. We need not go so far as to say, with Kingsley, that man must work and woman must weep; but at least he has to fight and to struggle, she has to solace and to heal. Ambition, sometimes high, sometimes low, but still ambition—ambition and success are the main motives and purpose of his life. Her noblest ambition is to foster domestic happiness, to bring comfort to the afflicted, and to move with unostentatious but salutary step over the vast territory of human affection. While man busies himself with the world of politics, with the world of commerce, with the rise and fall of empires, with the fortunes and fate of humanity, woman tends the hearth, visits the sick, consoles the suffering—in a word, in all she does, fulfils the sacred offices of love.

Now the highest literature—and Poetry is confessedly the highest literature—is a transfiguring reflex of life; and in its magic mirror we perforce see reflected all the thoughts, feelings, interests, passions, and events of human existence. In English poetry, therefore, we shall expect to hear both the masculine note and the feminine note; and in what proportions we hear them will be incidentally indicated in the course of my remarks. But it is the Feminine Note in which we are at present specially interested, and if I am asked to define briefly what I mean by this Feminine Note, I should say that I mean the private or domestic note, the compassionate note or note of pity, and the sentimental note or note of romantic love.

Now I am well aware there are numbers of people who look on poetry as something essentially and necessarily feminine, and who will say, “What do you mean by speaking of the Feminine Note in English poetry? Surely it has no other note, poetry being an effeminate business altogether, with which men, real robust men, need not concern themselves.” The people who hold this opinion can have but a very limited acquaintance with English poetry, and a yet more limited familiarity with the poetry of other ages and other nations that has come down to us. As a matter of fact, though the feminine note has rarely, if ever, been wholly absent from poetry, it is only of late years comparatively that it has become a very audible note. I should be carried too far away from my subject if I attempted to demonstrate the accuracy of this assertion by a survey, however rapid, of all the best-known poetry in languages, dead and living, of other times and other peoples. But to cite one or two familiar examples, is the feminine note, I may ask, the predominant, or even a frequent, note in the Iliad? The poem opens, it is true, with a dispute among the Argive chiefs, and mainly between Agamemnon and Achilles, concerning two young women. But how quickly Chryseis and Bryseis fall into the background, and in place of any further reference to them, we have a tempest of manly voices, the clang of arms, the recriminations of the Gods up in Olympus, and the cataloguing of the Grecian ships! Lest perhaps tender interest should be absent overmuch, just when Paris is being worsted in his duel with Menelaus for the determination of the siege, Venus carries him off under cover of a cloud, and brings Helen to his side. Then follows a scene in which the fair cause of strife and slaughter stands distracted between her passion for Paris, her shame at his defeat and flight, and her recollection of the brave Argive Chief she once called her lord. But more fighting promptly supervenes, and, save in such a passing episode as the lovely leave-taking of Hector and Andromache, the poem moves on through a magnificent medley of fighting, plotting, and speech-making. Even in that exceptionally tender episode what are the farewell words of Hector to his wife, “Go to your house and see to your own duties, the loom and the distaff, and bid your handmaidens perform their tasks. But for war shall man provide.” It is over the dead body of Patroclus that Achilles weeps; and whatever tears are shed in the Iliad are shed by heroes for heroes. Life, as represented in that poem, is a life in which woman plays a shadowy and insignificant part, and wherein domestic sentiments are subordinated to the rivalries of the Gods and the clash of chariot-wheels.

This subordinating of woman to man, of individual aims and private feelings to great aims and public issues, is equally present in the great Latin poem, the Æneid. “Arms and the Man, I sing,” says Virgil at once, and in the very first line of his poem; and though in one book out of the twelve of which it consists he sings of the woman likewise, it is but to leave her to her fate and to liberate Æneas from her seductions. Virgil is rightly esteemed the most tender and refined writer of antiquity. Yet to the modern reader, accustomed to the feminine note in poetry, there is something amazingly callous, almost cruel, in the lines with which, while the funeral pyre of Dido is still smoking, he tells us how Æneas, without a moment’s hesitation, makes for the open sea, and sails away from Carthage. But then the main business of Æneas was not to soothe or satisfy the Carthaginian queen, but to build the city and found the Empire of Rome. “Spirits,” says Shakespeare, “are not finely touched save to fine issues”; and it never would have occurred to Virgil to allow the hero of the Æneid to be diverted from his masculine purpose by anything so secondary as the love, or even the self-immolation, of a woman.

Let us, however, overleap the intervening centuries, and betake ourselves to the poetry of our own land and our own language. Chaucer, the first great English poet, was, like all writers of supreme genius, a prolific and voluminous writer, and we have thousands of verses of his besides the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. But it is by this latter work that he is best known; and it is pre-eminently and adequately representative, both of his own genius and of the temper of the times in which he lived. You will have to hunt very diligently through his description of the Knight, the Squire, the Yeoman, the Prioress, the Monk, the Merchant, the Sergeant of the Law, the Franklin, the Miller, the Manciple, and the rest of his jovial company, in order to find anything approaching the feminine note. He says little about what any of them thought, and absolutely nothing concerning what they felt, but confines himself to descriptions of their personal appearance, of their conduct and their character, in a word, of their external presentation of themselves. The Knight who wore a doublet all stained by his coat of mail, was well mounted, and had ridden far, no man farther. The Squire, or page, had curly locks, and had borne himself well in Flanders and Picardy. The Yeoman bore a weighty bow, handled his arrows and tackle in admirable fashion, and was dressed in a coat of green. The Monk was fat and in good case, and loved a roast swan more than any other dish. The Friar, we are told, had made many a marriage at his own cost, and would get a farthing out of a poor widow, though she had only one shoe left. The Franklin had a white beard and a high complexion, kept a capital table, and blew up his cook loudly if the sauces were not to his liking. The Wife of Bath had married five husbands, not to speak of other company in her youth; and the Sumpnor loved garlic, onions, and leeks, had a fiery face, and doated on strong wine. There is nothing very feminine in all this, is there? The one sole touch of tenderness that I can remember, and it is very elementary and introduced quite casually, is that in which we are told that the Prioress is so full of pity that she would weep if she saw a mouse caught in a trap. One can easily surmise what sort of tales would proceed from such downright, hearty, unromantic personages; and, save where any of them recite well-known stories from ancient poets, their own narratives are as buxom, burly, and as unsentimental as themselves. If princes and princesses, fine lords and ladies, be the heroes and heroines of the Tale, a certain amount of conventional pity is extended to their woes. But if the personages of the story be, as they for the most part are, common folk, and such as the story-tellers themselves would be likely to know, their misfortunes and mishaps are used merely as a theme for mirth and merciless banter. The humour displayed is excellent, but it is not the humour of charity. It is not compassionate, and it is not feminine. The feminine note is not absent from Chaucer’s Tales, but it is generally a subordinate note, a rare note, a note scarcely heard in his great concert of masculine voices.

Passing from the pages of Chaucer to those of Spenser is like passing from some cheery tavern where the ale is good and the jokes are excellent, but a trifle coarse, and the company diverting but a little mixed, to the banqueting-hall of some stately palace, where the wines and meats are of the choicest, where all the guests are of high degree, the women all fair, the men all courtly, and where fine manners and dignified speech leave no place for loud lewd laughter or even for homely familiarity. Surely in one who is such a poet, and such a gentleman, and in every respect, to quote a line of his own “a very perfect gentle knight,” we shall come across, ever and anon at least, the feminine note. And indeed we do. The first three stanzas of the Fairy Queen are dedicated to the description of the Knight that was pricking on the plain. But listen to the fourth:

A lovely lady rode him fair beside,

Upon a lowly ass more white than snow;

Yet she much whiter; but the same did hide

Under a veil that wimpled was full low,

And over all a black stole did she throw;

As one that inly mourned, so was she sad,

And heavy sate upon her palfrey slow.

Seemëd at heart some hidden care she had.

And by her in a line a milk-white lamb she lad.

So pure and innocent as that same lamb

She was, in life and every virtuous lore.

She by descent from royal lineage came.

Her name, as doubtless you well know, was Una, and, when by foul enchantment she is severed a while from her true knight, harken with what a truly feminine note Spenser bewails her misfortune:

Nought is there under heaven’s wide hollowness

Did recover more dear compassion of the mind

Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness

Through envy’s snare, or fortune’s freaks unkind.

I, whether lately through her brightness blind,

Or through allegiance, and fast fealty

Which I do owe unto all womankind,

Feel my heart prest with so great agony,

When such I see, that all for pity I could die.

Spenser cannot endure the thought of beauty in distress. So at once he brings upon the scene a ramping lion, which, in the ordinary course of things would have put a speedy end to her woes. But not so Spenser’s lion:

Instead thereof he kissed her weary feet,

And licked her lily hands with fawning tongue,

As he her wrongëd innocence did weet.

O how can beauty master the most strong.

And thus he goes on:

The lion would not leave her desolate,

But with her went along, as a strong guard

Of her chaste person, and a faithful mate

Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard:

Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward,

And when she waked, he waited diligent

With humble service to her will prepared.

This allegiance and fast fealty which Spenser declares he owes unto all womankind is the attitude, not only of all true knights and all true gentlemen, but likewise, I trust, of all true poets. But do not suppose on that account that Spenser is a feminine poet. He is very much the reverse. It would be impossible for a poet to be more masculine than he.

Upon a great adventure he was bound,

he says at once of his hero, and describes how the knight’s heart groaned to prove his prowess in battle brave. Spenser has the feminine note, but in subordination to the masculine note; and if I were asked to name some one quality by which you may know whether a poet be of the very highest rank, I should be disposed to say, “See if in his poetry you meet with the feminine note and the masculine note, and if the first be duly subordinated to the second.”

I wish it were possible, within the limit I have here assigned myself, to apply this test and pursue this enquiry at length in regard to Shakespeare, in regard to Milton, and likewise in regard to Dryden and Pope. But of this I am sure that the wider and deeper the survey the more clear would be the conclusion that in Shakespeare, as we might have expected, the masculine note and the feminine note are heard in perfect harmony, but by far the larger volume of sound proceeds from the former.

When, then, was it that the feminine note, the domestic or personal note, the compassionate note or note of pity, the purely sentimental note, was first heard in English poetry as a note asserting equality with the masculine note, and tending to assert itself as the dominant note?

One of the most beautiful and best-known poems in the English language is Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard; and in the following stanzas which many of you will recognise as belonging to it, do we not seem to overhear something like the note of which we are in search?—

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree’s shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,

The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed,

The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,

No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

Or busy housewife ply her ev’ning care:

No children run to lisp their sire’s return,

Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Here our sympathy is asked, not for kings and princesses, not for great lords and fine ladies, not for the rise and fall of empires, but for the rude forefathers of the hamlet, for the busy housewife, for the hard-working peasant and his children, for homely joys and the annals of the poor. But Gray does not maintain this note beyond the five stanzas I have just quoted. He quickly again lapses into the traditional, the classic, the purely masculine note:

The boast of Heraldry, the pomp of Pow’r,

And all that Beauty, all that Wealth e’er gave,

Await alike th’ inevitable hour,

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,

If Mem’ry o’er their tombs no trophies raise,

Where through the long-drawn aisle, and fretted vault,

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn, or animated bust,

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

The stanzas that follow are splendid stanzas, but they are the stately and sonorous verse of a detached and moralising mind, not the pathetic verse of a sympathising heart. We have to wait another twenty years before we come upon a poem of consequence in which the feminine note is not only present, but paramount. In the year 1770, nearly a century and a half ago, appeared Goldsmith’s poem, The Deserted Village, and in it I catch, for the first time, as the prevailing and predominant note, the note of feminine compassion, the note of humble happiness and humble grief. In Goldsmith’s verse we hear nothing of great folks except to be told how small and insignificant are the ills which they can cause or cure.

Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;

A breath can make them, as a breath hath made;

But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,

When once destroyed, can never be supplied.