MR. NOBLE'S ESSAYS.* Mn. ASHCROFT NOBLE is thoroughly well read
in English literature, and is clearly an accomplished critic, though to the mind of the present reviewer his preferences in poetry incline too much towards what we should call the sophisticated poets, rather than to the simplest and most artless,—for what we mean by artlessness is often the very highest art. For instance, in the very interesting and instructive essay on the sonnet, Mr. Noble reserves his higher praise for Milton, whose sonnets, to our mind, are far below his more elaborate poems, and hardly in more than three instances out of the eighteen reach the highest level of the English sonnet,—for Rossetti, whose sonnets have an artificial and thoroughly mor- bid ring which renders them to many thoroughly unpleasant reading,—and for Mrs. Browning, who, with all the beauty and
passion which she throws into the Sonnets from the Portuguese, scarcely gives us a single sonnet that has not a touch of artificial mannerism in it which a carping critic might describe as affecta-
tion. And even when he pitches on a poet who, like Matthew Arnold, wrote a few of the finest sonnets in our language, instead of quoting the greatest of them, that on Sophooles and that on Shakespeare, he takes occasion of a theoretic discussion of the structure of the sonnet, to quote the two on "Worldly Place" and "East London," which are surely
among the least impressive of Matthew Arnold's compositions. Of course, Mr. Noble recognises the singular perfection of Wordsworth's best sonnets ; but we cannot think him just to Wordsworth when he criticises him as follows :— "Pew poets so great as Wordsworth have been so deficient in what Goethe called the dsemonic element, the incalculable force which touches and sways us, we know not why or how. Words- worth's effects are all explicable and calculable ; we see 'the hidden pulse of the machine ;" [Mr. Noble misquotes the line ; it should be "the very pulse of the machine "] "he is, save in one or two memorable instances, wanting in what has been called natural magic ; and the existence of this very deficiency makes the charm and power of his work all the more remarkable. Now and then, in the sonnets, he catches a splendour beyond the reach of art, as in the concluding lines of the sonnet, Composed on Westminster Bridge ':-
'Dear Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep ; And all that mighty heart is lying still ; '-
but, as a rule, we are struck by the colloctedness of the poet ; by the fact that he is the master of his conceptions, not their servant, saying to this Go,' and it goeth, and to another 'Stay,' and it stayeth. And yet he was throughout guided by a sure instinct. He felt, if we may so put it, the responsibilities of the sonnet ; and, in spite of his imperfect theory of poetic language, which so often led him astray, the style of the sonnets, though some- times austere, is hardly ever bald. Nor do we find here any trace of Wordsworth's other besetting sin, the sin of diffuse- ness and limp expatiation. The poet whose work is self- conscious, who writes what he will rather than what he must, will always feel, as Wordsworth felt, the weight of too much liberty,' and the fetters of an arbitrary form like the sonnet seem less like fetters than supports and wholesome restraints. In the sonnets Wordsworth's style is at its finest : it is nervous, sinewy, compact, and yet always clear and fluent. His natural language had a note of simple dignity, but its natural- ness was not always preserved; for the simplicity sometimes sank Into puerility and the dignity deteriorated into bombast. In the sonnets, however, these lapses are almost non-existent. They are not dithyrambic, but they are always gravely eloquent, striking at the opening a clear resonant key-note of lofty emotion which is nobly sustained until the close. A score of the best known—and in Wordsworth's case the best known are the best—of the sonnets would be a collection of verse the companionable value of which would be in its way unsurpassed. Such poetic treasures as 'The world is too much with us,' 'Earth bath not anything to show more fair,' 'Great men have been among us," Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour,' and a dozen others which linger in the memory, have a tonic and invigorating quality which it is difficult to overestimate."
* The Sonnet in England, and other Essays. By J. Ashcroft Noble. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane. 1893.
Surely, if no great poet has ever descende I into so prosaic a bathos as Wordsworth not seldom blunderel into, it is equally true that none has ever risen to lines of more exquisite "natural magic." Nor should we choose the couplet which Mr. Noble quotes as the finest example of this, for, splendid as is the last line, the epithet applied to God seems out of place in that connection, and has always injured, to our ear, the otherwese crystal beauty of the sonnet. The close of the sonnet to Toussaint L'O uverture has, we think, a natural magic far more remarkable :— " Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, Live and take comfort. Thou haat left behind Powers that will work for thee,—air, earth, and skies!
There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind."
Or take the sonnet, "Two voices are there : one is of the sea, One of the mountains," with its magnificent close. Surely the poet who wrote "The Ode to Duty," with its transcendent climax, the lines to "The Cuckoo," "The Ode on the Intima- tions of Immortality ;" who described "The light that nover was, on sea or land ; The consecration, and the Poet's dream,"— who gave us "Three years she grew in sun and shower," in which every line is full of natural magic ; who gave us the "Song at the Feast of Broughton Castle," with the magical contrast between the "impassioned minstrel's" in- vocation to the restored Clifford,— " Like a reappearing star, Like a glory from afar," first to "head the flock of war," and the exquisite verses in which the poet describes the very different temper of the Shepherd Lord, whose daily teachers had been "woods and rills," "the silence that is in the starry sky, the sleep that is among the lonely hills,"—surely this is not a poet whom we can call singularly destitute of natural magic. And, on the other hand, Mr. Noble must have forgotten the ghastly sonnet to Rai sley Calvert, the " worthy short-lived youth," who left Wordsworth 2200 a year, and was rewarded for it with these cruel epithets, and the one beginning, "Jones, as from Calais southward you and I," and, indeed, many another sonnet, when he speaks of Wordsworth as hardly ever lapsing into bathos in the sonnet. To our minds, no great poet so unequal as Wordsworth ever wrote, none who could strike a note of more magical power, none who could so un- consciously lapse into an almost transcendental flatness,—the kind of flatness which it took a man of genius to ignore.
Nor can we quite agree with Mr. Noble in placing the sonnet proper so far above the Shakespearian sonnet. Plainly it should be in itself worthy of note that such a poet as Shakespeare preferred the form which is associated with his name ; and for ourselves we recognise in it a freer and more elastic movement than that of the Italian sonnet with all its rather too carefully ordered, and we might almost says minuetish grace.
In the fine essay on "The Poetry of Common-Sense," we find ourselves in much closer agreement with Mr. Noble, though it is surely going too far to say that a poem which is "defective in the core of common-sense," cannot be a really great poem. We think it might be fairly admitted by the admirers of Coleridge that both " Christabel "and the "Ancient Mariner" contain no great core of common-sense ; nay, we should say the same of Keats's "St. Agnes' Eve "and of most of Shelley's poems, "The Witch of Atlas," for instance. But the flight of the imagination is not limited to subjects to which experience gives us our only clue ; and " common-sense" surely implies experience, and is, as it were, the very heart of experience. If we are to deny to the poet any theme in which common-sense cannot be his guide, would even Goethe's " Walpurgienacht " be above criticism ? The essays on Leigh Hunt, Robert Buchanan, and Hawker of Morwenstow, are all very pleasant reading, though we think Mr. Noble puts Leigh Hunt too high as a poet, and though he says nothing of the very great falling-off in Mr. Buchanan's poetry during the last fifteen years. Mr. Buchanan deserved to be reckoned one of the greater poets of England ; but he has done more to reduce his own poetic level in the world in the years which have elapsed since he wrote " White Rose and Red," than any critic could have done for him. "The Legends of Inverburn " and " The London Poems" are full of the most original and powerful verse.
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