|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 19
In the practice of Sainte-Beuve himself, these two acknowledgments of
the duty of the critic embraced each other in the happiest union. The
want of enthusiasm which has been sometimes rather sillily charged
against him, comes in reality to no more than this--that he is too
busy in analysing, putting together again, comparing, setting things
in different lights and in different companies, to have much time for
dithyrambs. And the preference of second-to first-class subjects,
which has been also urged, is little more than the result of the fact
that these processes are more telling, more interesting, and more
needed in the case of the former than in the case of the latter.
Homer, �schylus, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare will always make their
own way with all fit readers sooner or later: it is not so with
Meleager or Macrobius or Marmontel, with William Langland or with
Thomas Love Peacock.
But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all
important as was the influence of the one upon the other. It is enough
to say that the new Professor of Poetry (who might be less
appetisingly but more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had
long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of
effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve's own
lines, partly on others which he had already made publicly known in
his famous Preface, and in some later critical writings, and which he
was for the rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion,
sometimes rather disastrously to extend.
Still it has always been held that this chair is not _merely_ a
chair of criticism; and Mr Arnold lodged a poetical diploma-piece in
the shape of _Merope_. This was avowedly written as a sort of
professorial manifesto--a document to show what the only Professor of
Poetry whom England allowed herself thought, in theory and practice,
of at least dramatic poetry. It was, as was to be expected from the
author's official position and his not widespread but well-grounded
reputation, much less neglected than his earlier poetry had been. He
even tells us that "it sells well"; but the reviewers were not
pleased. The _Athen�um_ review is "a choice specimen of style,"
and the _Spectator_ "of argumentation"; the _Saturday Review_ is only
"deadly prosy," but none were exactly favourable till G.H. Lewes in
_The Leader_ was "very gratifying." Private criticism was a little
kinder. The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to whom, indeed, Mr
Arnold had just given "a flaming testimonial for Rugby") read it "with
astonishment at its goodness," a sentence which, it may be observed,
is a little double-edged. Kingsley (whom the editor of the _Letters_
good-naturedly but perhaps rather superfluously reintroduces to the
British public as "author of _The Saints' Tragedy_ and other poems")
was "very handsome." Froude, though he begs the poet to "discontinue
the line," was not uncomplimentary in other ways. His own conclusion,
from reviews and letters together, is pretty plainly put in two
sentences, that he "saw the book was not going to take as he wished,"
and that "she [Merope] is more calculated to inaugurate my
professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of
_humans_." Let us see what "she" is actually like.
It is rather curious that the story of Merope should have been so
tempting as, to mention nothing else, Maffei's attempt in Italian,
Voltaire's in French, and this of Mr Arnold's in English, show it to
have been to modern admirers and would-be practitioners of the
Classical drama: and the curiosity is of a tell-tale kind. For the
fact is that the _donn�e_ is very much more of the Romantic than of
the Classical description, and offers much greater conveniences to the
Romantic than to the Classical practitioner. With minor variations,
the story as generally dramatised is this. Merope, the widowed queen
of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved her youngest son from
the murderer and usurper, Polyphontes, and sent him out of the
country. When he has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia
to take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let bygones be
bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile the jarring parties in the
State. �pytus, the son, to facilitate his reception, represents
himself as a messenger charged to bring the news of his own death; and
Merope, hearing this and believing the messenger to be also the
assassin, obtains access to the chamber where he is resting after his
journey, and is about to murder her own sleeping son when he is saved
by the inevitable _anagnorisis_. The party of Cresphontes is then
secretly roused. �pytus, at the sacrifice which the tyrant holds in
honour of the news of his rival's death, snatches the sacrificial axe
and kills Polyphontes himself, and all ends well.
There is, of course, a strong dramatic moment here; but I cannot think
the plot by any means an ideal one for classical tragedy. At any rate
the Aristotelian conditions--the real ones, not the fanciful
distortions of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism--are very ill
satisfied. There is bloodshed, but there is no tragic bloodshed, as
there would have been had Merope actually killed her son. The
arresting and triumphant "grip" of the tragic misfortunes of Oedipus
and Orestes, the combination of the course of fate and the [Greek:
hamartia] of the individual, is totally absent. The wooing of Merope
by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insignificant, though
Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has rescued it or half-rescued it
from this most terrible of limbos. The right triumphs, no doubt; but
who cares whether it does or not? And Mr Arnold, with the heroic
obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to help the effect of a
scheme in itself sufficiently uninspiring to the modern reader. When
he was at work upon the piece he had "thought and hoped" that it would
have what Buddha called "the character of Fixity, that true sign of
the law." A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy
forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry,
and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should
"transport" not "fix." At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads
the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and
exaggeration--not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of
Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr
Arnold's verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. The dreary
_tirades_ of Polyphontes and Merope, and their snip-snap
_stichomythia_, read equally ill in English. Mr Swinburne, who has
succeeded where Mr Arnold failed, saw by a true intuition that, to
equal the effect of the Greek chorus, full English lyric with rhyme
and musical sweep was required. Mr Arnold himself, as might have been
expected from his previous experiments in unrhymed Pindarics, has
given us strophes and antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in
syllables; but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very much,
vesture of poetry about them. It is absolutely preposterous to suppose
that the effect on a Greek ear of a strophe even of Sophocles or
Euripides, let alone the great Agamemnonian choruses, was anything
like the effect on an English ear of such wooden stuff as this:--
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|