Text
Editionsbericht
Literatur: Garnett
Literatur: Macmillan's Magazine
EVERY poet pleads, and every critic laments, the difficulties opposed by modern habits of thought, and the constitution of modern society, to the production of substantial works of poetic art - such, we mean, as affect an independent concrete existence, instead of merely serving to express the feelings of the writers as individuals. If, it is said, the author resorts for his [122] subject to the antique or the ideal world, the degree of his success does but serve to measure the remoteness of his exile from contemporary interests and sympathies; if, on the other hand, he endeavours to reflect the life around him, he can no more escape alloying his strain with the transitory and accidental than the diver can avoid bringing up the oyster with the pearl. This is true; but it cannot be said that the unhappy divorce between the real and ideal is the especial disaster of our times. Few and brief have been the periods in human history when a vital belief in a mythology capable of supplying art with the most exalted themes has co-existed with the ability to apply it to poetic usages. The reason is evident - that such a degree of ability implies a degree of culture and intelligence in presence of which the most picturesque legends disappear like
"A withered morn,
Smote by the fresh beam of the springing East."
For two generations only was it possible for the Greeks to retain, along with the civilization which permitted their tragic poets to exemplify the perfection of artistic skill no less than of native power, the simple traditional belief which gave their dramas a root in the national life as well as the national sense of beauty. Dante's contemporaries readily explained the gloom of his aspect as the effect of his Stygian experiences; but the Cardinal of Este, two hundred and fifty years later, would probably have referred the Divine Divine Comedy to the same category as the Orlando Furioso. In fact, the difficulty of accomplishing the task on which which modern criticism rather vociferously insists, of finding imaginative expression for the interests, aspirations, and social peculiarities of our own age, is so far from being any special characteristic of the age in question that it would be hard to point out any writers who have more unequivocally succumbed to it than the great Italian pair of the sixteenth century - Aristo and Tasso. The contemporaries of the Constable Bourbon can hardly have cared much about Orlando; and, in Tasso's day, the Holy Sepulchre, so far from being the goal of a crusade, would not even answer as a pretext for replenishing the Papal coffers. If, then, the universal witness of the human heart justified Mrs. Browning in her "Distrust" of
"The poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle court,"
the the successive laureates of that lucky house of Este ought to have been poetically dead and buried long ago. notoriety of the contrary fact suggests that the utilitarian theory of poetry may perhaps be less sound than specious. We see (and, if further example be required, Spenser, Keats, Shelley, and Schiller are at hand) that it is quite possible for genius to disdain the ground of realities and yet exist - though, it may be but as a wild, wandering beauty, a
"Strange bird of Paradise
That floats through Heaven and cannot light."
The modern impatience of the indirect operation of the humanizing and harmonizing influences of art - the confusion of the poet's function with that of the philosopher, the legislator, the reformer - have only tended to make writers conceited and readers unjust.
Still, however extravagant the form in which it may sometimes find expression, the desire to see poetry brought into a more intimate relation with the practical needs of the age is in itself laudable and legitimate. In proportion to our appreciation of the elevating and refining character of its influences must be our unwillingness to contemplate these as necessarily limited in their operation to a small literary class. It cannot be said that contemporary poets have, as a body, shown any indisposition "to grapple with the questions of the time." On the contrary, their mistake has rather consisted in the failure to discriminate between those vitally and eternally significant and the merely trans[123]ient and accidental features of the age. We live in times exceedingly favourable to the development of the speculative faculty - a period in which it is hardly possible to reflect seriously on any important topic without encountering some problem in urgent need of solution. The answers which for so many centuries have more or less contented the inquiring mind of man are now found to have been merely provisional; and, while old questions are being reopened on all sides, the gigantic development of physical and political science has suggested an infinity of new ones. By virtue of its peculiar sensitiveness, the poetic is even more likely than the ordinary mind to conceive an intense interest in some of these problems; and it is the very law of its being to reproduce its impressions in its creations. Unfortunately, nothing but an instinctive sense of artistic fitness will enable it to distinguish the permanent from the accidental features of its fascinating environment. We might mention two contemporary poets who possess this delicate tact, but doubt if the list could be extended.
Some writers not merely by preference adopt a metrical form as the vehicle of thought, but are before all things poets. Their conception of a poet is not that of one writing to instruct, to refine, to expound a plan of life, to accomplish any end whatever capable of being expressed with logical precision in words; but whose aim, or rather call it instinct, is simply to compose poetry. If you ask what this poetry is, they cannot tell you; they are only sure that it is an actual entity, as real an existence as painting or music. As painting, they would say, is not outline and colour, so neither is poet's language and rhythm; these are simply the vesture of the spirit else invisible. As music is not an ingenious way of moving the passions, but a something which possesses this among other properties, so the power of poetry to exalt or admonish is indeed an inherent quality, but not the essence of poetry itself. A writer who has risen to this conception of his art will neither make perfection of form nor practical utility his main object, for his instinct assures him that the soul of poetry lies elsewhere. As the painter does not conceive the universe to be all colour, as the musician has eyes as well as ears, so he himself does not regard poetry as sunlight, steeping the universe in a flood of monotonous radiance, but as the intense electric beam, whose splendid concentration on some objects only serves to isolate them from the surrounding darkness. Consequently, he will be an eclectic, content with selecting from the mass of contemporary interests those themes alone which appear to him susceptible of poetic treatment; like a bee, he alights only upon flowers. Thus, though Mr. Tennyson is one of the most thoughtful of men, familiar with every branch of ethical and abstract speculation, it is impossible to extract anything like a theory of life from his writings, simply because such a theory must necessarily take cognisance of a multitude of details which he has intuitively perceived to be unpoetical. The same might have been said even of so eminent a thinker as Goethe, had he never written in prose
But, it may be asked, is the reader dependent on the fidelity of the writer's intuitions? Can he not determine for himself when he is or is not reading poetry? We might reply that he is himself frequently a participant in "the vision and the faculty divine," even though "the channels between thought and expression may have been obstructed." Perhaps, however, it may be possible to discover a less abrupt Gradus ad Parnassum. Painting, sculpture, music, are found to agree in the common aim of raising man above himself - of substituting a state of emotion for one of tranquillity. If no emotion be excited by the sight of a painting or a statue, or the hearing of a piece of music, then either the spectator or listener is naturally insensible to the influence of art, or has temporarily become so through satiety, pre-occupation, or infirmity, or else the merits of the work itself are merely of a technical character. Poetry, in the proper sense of the term, [124] is attended by the same effect, and may be discovered by the same criterion. The range of the poetic is indeed more extensive than that of the sister arts. Emotion may be aroused by an appeal to the affections, as in Moore's -
"I know not, I ask not, if guilt's in that heart;
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art"
- to the imagination, as in Shelley's description of the waning moon: —
"Like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up on the murky earth,
A white and shapeless mass;"
or, finally, by the enunciation of some grand moral or philosophical truth, such as Wordsworth's -
"Sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
This latter sublime passage is to be rather apprehended intuitively than by a conscious effort of the understanding; and so in every case the appeal is addressed to feeling of some sort; 1 and, therefore, poetry, in the highest sense, cannot undertake the construction of a theory of life or the universe, on which the logical faculty alone is competent to pronounce. Yet this is the very work which each successive generation requires and attempts to accomplish. The highest kind of poetry, then, cannot fulfil the wants and wishes of contemporaries; and it even requires self-discipline and watchfulness, and an ambition of achieving practical results, to prevent its wandering off altogether into the ideal regions which are after all most congenial to its nature. Mrs. Shelley has recorded the difficulty her husband experienced in composing political songs, political zealot as he was.
The cultivation of poetry for its own sake is, however, quite exceptional, even with poets. With most, when once they have travelled beyond the simple lyrical expression of their individual emotions, the main impulse to the production of poetry has obviously been to afford the world the benefit of their opinion on subjects which appear to them of importance. Thus, if we are to accept Milton's own account of his aims, his sublimest flights of imagination are merely accessories to the practical end of "justifying the ways of God to man." It is impossible to suppose that the architect of Pandemonium took no pleasure in his work for its own sake, independent of the value he ascribed to it as a buttress of theology; but, with less imaginative writers, the artistic motive disappears in the didactic. In the "Course of Time," for example, the Calvinistic polemic is real and hearty; the imaginative form a reminiscence of Milton, as conventional as a red petticoat in a landscape. The same assertion, mutatis mutandis, may be made with reference to Cowper, Young, Crabbe, &c. Almost all Wordsworth's poems stand in direct and calculated relation to his theories of life and art. Even Mrs. Browning tells us that she intends "Aurora Leigh" as the exponent of her own. Now we think we may venture to assume as axioms -
1. That every system of thought is in some way the offspring of the age in which it makes its appearance. Thus Wordsworth's anti-conventionalism was at bottom merely another manifestation of the same spirit that was contemporaneously overthrowing the thrones of the continent. The Tractarian protest against the tendencies of the age was virtually as much the creature of the age as those tendencies themselves.
2. The poets who frame such systems are necessarily better exponents of the special characteristics of their times than those who restrict themselves to the essentially poetical; for this is the common property of all ages. But, the [125] more completely they express these characteristic features, the more certainly do they reproduce the frivolous casual aspects of the age, as well as those of serious and permanent significance. Consequently, the problem, how to adapt the eternal spirit of poetry to contemporary interests and sympathies, does not admit of a satisfactory solution. A rigid idealist, professing to go round the world without transgressing the limits of pure poetry, is like one endeavouring to empty the sea with a bucket. A mere realist, trying to accomplish the poet's task with the satirist's tools, would hew an oak with rushes, weave a cable from sand. The same strictures apply to the purely didactic poet, who is inevitably driven to adapt his instructions to the special requirements of his generation.
[Fußnote, S. 124]
1 See Mr. Mill's masterly essay on
Poetry and its Varieties
("Dissertations and Discussions," vol. 1).
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Macmillan's Magazine.
Bd. 3, November 1860-April 1861, Dezember 1860, S. 121-131.
Unser Auszug: S. 121-125
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DOI: 10.14361/9783839451137-018
Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer