1
It is a very ancient view that occult purposes act from behind the exterior psychology to produce works of poetic excellence. For, all great poets have believed in invoking what they called the Muse: no poet denies that in his perfect moments a rare superhuman force rushes through his ordinary consciousness. However, in various poets the force functions in various ways. Byron did not believe that inspiration could come by sitting and waiting for it, and to disprove that Wordsworthian notion he conducted a series of experiments: evening after evening he sat with a pen in his hand and a sheet of paper in front of him, asking the Muse to come down and make him write. Critics who do not relish "milord" 's poetry may say that inspiration could never have visited Byron because he was not a true poet at all; but this is rather to overshoot the mark, for there are passages even in Byron bearing the authentic stamp. A poet who could write about Lucifer that
...his eye
Glared forth the immortality of hell
might with reason expect the Muse to dictate sometimes to him when he had invited her descent long enough. The failure was due really to his positing wrong conditions — conditions unsuitable to his temperament.
A poet like Wordsworth could draw inspiration by a patient waiting, but Byron's mind acted by an easy natural movement: to make it a blank was rather to obfuscate than clear its receptive mood. He shared with Shelley a spontaneous flow, a rapid inspiration, though one cannot put on an equal footing the rhetorical rush of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the visionary fire of Prometheus Unbound. Byron began
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his poetic career by dictating oriental tales to his valet while dressing for dinners to which he had been invited: not in the least an irrational method — we can well imagine Shakespeare to have dashed off pages of Hamlet in the green room while some actor was tidying himself up and chatting to him over his shoulder. For inspiration acts according to the peculiarities of a writer. Schiller could not compose his dramas unless he had a boxful of rotting apples under his table, and Milton could not continue fluently his Paradise Lost between the vernal and the autumnal equinoxes: wintry dullness which might freeze the genial current of other poetic souls let loose cataract on cataract of words in his. The point is that an extraordinary power possesses the poet, deploys itself capriciously, fills him with tense music, then lets him drop into loose verbiage, and returns at odd moments to string him up anew.
It is possible to regulate the power somewhat, but beyond a certain degree no poet can be sure of it. And during his contact with its miracles, he is conscious of plumbing some divine depth in himself or is borne on a burning breath of rapture or, with a hand stretched as if in sleep, plucks strange fruit from an invisible tree. The dim profound, the luminous wind, the magic wood are all unknown things — larger than the individual and existing beyond his day-to-day thoughts and desires. They are his symbolic experiences of the Muse within him, the daimon or in-dwelling presence with whom he is identified on rare occasions but whom he recognises as a mighty independent spirit standing on a threshold between the waking intelligence and the dream-state. When the poet is genuinely inspired, a part of him is as though hypnotised by ideas, images, words into an absorbed aloofness from the outer mind; he becomes self-withdrawn, he wears a look of surrender to the incalculable. Even when he tries forcibly to get the right effect it is a frantic cry to the Muse to come and conquer him, a flinging of himself into the Muse's arms rather than a masterful grasping of her to wrench out the mot juste.
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This daimon has in each great poet a certain curve of progress to trace: whether the curve comes full circle or not depends upon a large complex of circumstances. Among English poets, only two got to the end of their journey — Shakespeare and Milton. Spenser fell within eyeshot of his goal: nobody else did even so much. Coleridge did famous things, but his destination remained vague because Wordsworth's soul-composing mind-assuring simplicity was removed from his neighbourhood and he was left drowning in the oceans of his own labyrinthine restlessness. Wordsworth himself lapsed after a brief decade of keen beauty into benevolent dullness because not only did his philosophy have its initial root in Coleridge but even his poetic sensibility had been lit by Coleridge's inflammable temperament and could not long keep a living glow on its own. It was Wordsworth who had sustained Coleridge's already awakened genius, but it was Coleridge who by his contact gave Wordsworth's music a noble accent. Tennyson had a half-morbid half-visionary strain in him which with his curious eye for scenic detail would have brought us colourful and quivering or magically intonated masterpieces on a large scale, if he had not allowed it to superficialise itself into inane sentimentalism and a habit of uttering platitudes with a pensive air. Swinburne fared better, yet lived through most of his manhood and old age in a condition of lop-sided growth: his expansive power kept developing beautiful intricacies of rhythm whereas the faculty to brood and concentrate and delve deep went numb, waking up at rare intervals in an excitement which carried most precious poetic wealth but soon exhausted itself.
There are, however, other circumstances more catastrophic than a long yet unconsummated career; and their classical victims are Keats and Shelley and, before them, Marlowe. They did not have even an opportunity to answer the command which the daimon lays upon the outer life.
Keats has left us his precise plans — namely, to write poems combining the colour of St. Agnes' Eve with a greater
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stress of character-play and psychological motive, as a prelude to some strong and rich dramatic projection in the Shakespearean style. His Hyperion would most probably have remained for a long time a fragment; for Keats was getting disgusted with epic and mythological themes. The resonant language which, while treating them, he beat out for himself he would have wished to use for fashioning, in place of gods and titans, personations of powerful human moods, some disillusioned Othello or frustrated Coriolanus, some Antony blinded to all the world by the dazzling darkness of a Cleopatra's eyes. But would Keats have realised his wish? If he had had the slightest capacity to create live characters — and without that no drama worth the name can exist — it would have displayed itself, at least to some degree, in his extant dramatic efforts. These efforts make no living gesture, and Keats would have, in the last analysis, ill-used his mature years by running after the Shakespearean ideal. He was sure to have discovered his mistake — but perhaps at much cost, just as the ludicrous Cap and Bells frittered away the precious energy he should have spent on continuing Hyperion.
Shelley's development was much more certain; his death too was more lamentable, since Keats died and inspired Adonais and so in a way his passing was compensated for, while the remembrance of Shelley's dust has never bloomed into immortal poetic beauty. If he had lived, his progress would have been towards reflective mysticism. We are too apt to ignore the intellect Shelley possessed: Mary's reminiscences as well as his own prose writings afford us a convincing proof of it. His philosophic spirit, brooding over life's riddle, solved it at first by a lyric vision of a world free in its heart and imagination from superstitious no less than political chains, but he was bound later to arrive at some more clear and controlled thought-process and some more definite spiritual experience side by side with the lyric impulse and the symbolic vision. Shelley could never have stopped growing and in the right direction for his peculiar
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genius: not since Shakespeare had a poet been so completely in rapport with his daimon — his inspired fluency Milton himself had never rivalled. From that point of view a wider gap was left in English verse by the squall in the Bay of Spezzia which drowned his voice for ever than by the coughing lungs that wasted the life-breath of Keats in Rome; besides, even the inspired fluency of Keats can be compared in swiftness with Milton's and not with Shakespeare's.
From another point of view, that squall was more disastrous than the stab which ended Marlowe; for I believe that, despite his premature end, Marlowe's daimon, unlike Shelley's, was not cut off from sovereign fulfilment. Only, it fulfilled itself after Marlowe's own death and under new conditions of consciousness.
Let me explain the paradox. No two poets can write always in exactly the same style and with the same psychological attitude. But if the essence of one poet's drift got mingled in another poet with new qualities and somehow coloured them into its own likeness amid all variations, it might not be impossible to detect the phenomenon. My statement about Marlowe rests on a feeling that such a phenomenon has occurred with regard to him. We must, nevertheless, keep in mind that what he himself would have produced by way of a magnum opus would have been something unique, something no other poet could have written because temperamental differences were bound to interfere. So if the phenomenon I have spoken of has taken place we should best appreciate its meaning and extent by a comparison between the hypothetical magnum opus and the novel form I suppose to have been assumed by the essence of that eruptive energy whose literary flash and detonation we know as Christopher Marlowe.
What was that essence? Marlowe's purple patches and terrible episodes bewilder the mind with their infinite of utterance, so to speak — a stupendous power directed in the main to an expression of wilful personality straining, with magnificent disaster, against the universe and the Divine.
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The first bodying forth of Marlowe's daimon, the occult greatness which seems to have tried his life-force as its vehicle, we find in that unwieldy colossus of his early twenties, Tamburlaine — a work meant to be a drama but destitute of all constructive artistry, a manifold confusion through which the figure of its hero moves in a storm of word-thunder and imaginative lightning. The conception underlying it is the titan-soul's battle with destiny: Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd, raises the banner of revolt against Persia and rides victorious over half the world in a gigantic beauty of arrogance and ambition and defiance of man and God, with only one joint in his armour — the love which ravages his heart for his wife Zenocratè. Through this joint he receives his mortal wound, for in the midst of his glory death carries away Zenocratè and soon after lays low the conqueror's own life.
The same theme of personal grandeur towering against the forces of Nature and Providence to a last toppling point runs through all of Marlowe's later production in one form or another of imaginative life-force cast into dramatic movement with no sure success anywhere in that particular mould. There is a certain power of dramatic occasion at his command, but we feel at the same time as though his was a mind which attempted to dramatise with initially a poor constructive gift a natural epic vein, with the result that its sole triumphs were individual scenes such as that most perfect climax to Faustus. For, the daimon who would somehow be out saw in him possibilities both epic and dramatic, and tried to struggle with his rather unbalanced temperament towards some definite and harmonious issue. Before the experiment could come to any satisfying conclusion Marlowe died a violent death at the age of twenty-nine. What would his twofold impulse have ripened into? Would he have penned an epic? Would he have mastered the drama?
In Edward II he was moving towards dramatic structure; but such a framework seems to have run counter to his
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purely poetic urge and wearied and weakened it by too stringent and preoccupying a check to his impetuosity. To me he seems an experiment wherein the occult voices were conceiving an epic drama with the central conception bodied forth a little loosely in semi-dissolving scenes. When some harmonising instinct would have emerged and he would have gained a more uniform control over his blank verse which usually tended, apart even from lack of enjambment, to be a little disproportionate by some musical defect in sentence-formation, then his crowning achievement could have most naturally been a work with Satan as its principal character, the Paradise Lost refigured in a huge phantasmagoria of a play. For, what else is Paradise Lost save an epic nth degree of a grandiose egoism up in arms against the universal Law, a titan ambition warring disastrously with the inscrutable Divine - the basic Marlovian idea consummated?
Of course, important contrasts strike one: Milton was an intellectual and his hero could never be Marlowe's sheer life-force, the mind with its deliberate experiences, its half-spiritual "exultations and agonies", has come on the stage; but the salient feature remains that Milton has thrown himself heart and soul into a theme and figure than which nothing more to Marlowe's taste could be conceived, especially after his almost skirting Milton's domain in the legend of Faustus. It is as though what had moved the old life-force has now appeared behind the new intellectual being and Marlowe's daimon risen to Milton's mental level, making Satan a transfigured Tamburlaine, a sublimation of Barabas, a high unity of Faustus and Mephistophilis. That is why after revolving about a hundred subjects in his mind, many of them scriptural and the rest from British history, Milton fixed on an epic idea and tone so much in Marlowe's line, and as soon as he crossed over to other parts of his epic, parts less Marlovian, his inspiration marked a comparative decline. In addition, have we not his own record that his original design was to embody his poetry in a form of drama and that he had drawn up a whole scheme suited to that treatment — a
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Marlowe-tendency again, relinquished because of his own more mental and less vitally creative nature?
Take his blank verse itself, the strength and the amplitude of it: what he has governed and modulated by a technical pattern of line-overflow, scrupulous shift of pause, and rolling yet compact syntax, is the thunderous "infinite" of Marlowe intellectualised. That this author was not his favourite study adds only an extra interest to the occult way in which the Elizabethan's penchant in substance and in quality of style appears to have been repeated in him under the conditions of the intellect and a new technique. Is this Tamburlaine or Satan described? —
Of stature tall, and straightly fashionèd,
Like his desire, lift upward and divine;
So large of limb, his joints so strongly knit,
Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear
Old Atlas's burden.
And whose vaulting ambition speaks thus — the Scythian conqueror's or the Archangel's? —
Give me a look, that when I bend the brows
Pale death may walk in furrows of my face;
A hand that with a grasp may gripe the world;
A royal seat, a sceptre and a crown,
That those that do behold them may become
As men that stand and gaze against the sun.
Is it not possible to catch Miltonic correspondences in lines like:
There angels in their crystal armours fight
A doubtful battle with my tempted thoughts,
or those others:
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Come, let us march against the powers of heaven
And set black streamers in the firmament
To signify the slaughter of the gods;
or in that resounding vaunt:
Give me a map; then let me see how much
Is left for me to conquer all the world.
Here I began to march towards Persia,
Along Armenia and the Caspian Sea,
And thence into Bithynia, where I took
The Turk and his great empress prisoners...
And thence to Nubia near Borno-lake
And so along the Ethiopian Sea,
Cutting the tropic line of Capricorn,
I conquered all as far as Zanzibar...
Look here, my boys; see what a world of ground
Lies westward from the midst of Cancer's line
Unto the rising of this earthly globe,
Whereas the sun declining from our sight
Begins the day with our Antipodes!
And shall I die, and this unconquerèd?
Lo here, my sons, are all the golden mines,
Inestimable drugs and precious stones,
More worth than Asia and the world beside;
And from th'Antarctic Pole eastward behold
As much more land which never was descried,
Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright
As all the lamps that beautify the sky!
And shall I die, and this unconquerèd? —
or, again, in the colloquy between Faustus and Mephistophilis when the former has asked, "How comes it then that thou art out of hell?" And the reply rings forth:
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God
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And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?
Faustus, who is in seed-form the complement of Mephistophilis for half of Milton's complete Satan to get evolved from, flings a reproach at the fallen spirit's torment:
What, is great Mephistophilis passionate
For being deprivèd of the joys of heaven?
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,
And scorn the joys thou never shalt possess.
The last line is perfect Miltonese, just as the following two where the idea that hell is an inward condition essentially — an idea whose converse is Satan's famous cry that heaven too is an inward condition and the mind can turn hell into heaven — is taken up by Mephistophilis:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
To one self place; for where we are is hell.
No less Miltonic are the words a little before, when it is questioned how Lucifer, "arch-regent and commander of all spirits", has become the "prince of devils":
O, by aspiring pride and insolence;
For which God threw him from the face of heaven —
and those put in the mouth of Faustus elsewhere:
Now by the kingdoms of infernal rule,
Of Styx, of Acheron, and the fiery lake
Of ever-burning Phlegethon, I swear.
Here even the verse-movement is like Milton's, but in all these excerpts the essential attitude and energy is so anti-
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cipatory of Paradise Lost that to anyone with an occult sense of the poetic afflatus it would seem that the epic possibility lost in Marlowe attained its goal through Milton, though from a different plane.
We might say it attained its goal in a far more consummate manner, too, because of the Puritan poet's maturer, more stable, constructive and intellectual disposition; but in spite of the flaws we might expect to accompany Marlowe's hand, there would have been in his composition not a greater fire but, as distinguished from an organised conflagration, brighter spurts of fire arising from his recrudescent vitality on the one hand and on the other his usual technique of end-stopped lines. The latter, though depriving him of the organ-music possible to enjambment, would have induced his genius for power to put into it in the day of his full poetic growth a preternatural rage of colourful phrase so that the means by which alone the absence, on a large scale, of overflow from one line to another could be supported might perform its function with the utmost effect. I do not think his Satan would have had to such a superb and unrivalled degree the adamantine will of Milton's: a less heroic figure, he would have alternated between defiance and despair, not submitting or yielding but gnawed more miserably by a secret remorse. Whereas, if the poet had gone beyond the loss of heaven to the temptation of Adam and Eve and if the incidents in the Garden of Eden had inspired him, even as much or as little as Milton, the first man and the first woman would have passed to their doom with a more vivid and dynamic disobedience. They would also have had a more dreadful aftermath of repentance: one remembers Faustus's cry —
O, I'll leap up to my God! — Who pulls me down? —
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ! —
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
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Yet will I call on him: O spare me, Lucifer! —
Where is it now? 'tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
Another certainty is that Marlowe's God would have spoken more grandly than Milton's and matched the eloquence of Satan instead of being, as in Paradise Lost, mostly a prosaic paragon, omnipotence distilled to never-ending dullness.
What Marlowe could never have supplied was, apart from the masterful and many-mooded artistry of Paradise Lost, the nobility of soul which permeated its power and which derived from its author's unique individuality. A religious intensity of the intellect was one of the wings to Milton's inspiration, while Marlowe had only his élan vital: from a false sense of reverence the former may generally have made his God passionless in speech, but his own fervour for the Divine gave the poem the prophetic overtone that counterbalanced his massive imaginative obsession by Satan's figure — nay, subtly interfused with it and suggested some inner mystic depth at the same time as the outer titanic height. Where this fervour had an unfettered play, the music was most remarkably from a plane inaccessible to Marlowe — graver than his in substance and rhythmic ecstasy and to the intellectual self of man more satisfying: no one except Milton could have written the stately opening of Paradise Lost, the beautiful and poignant invocation to Light with which the third book begins, the tremendous prelude in the seventh to Urania. No one else could have thus worded Belial's fear of extinction at the hands of All-Might as a cure for misery:
Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
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This was, psychologically, beyond Marlowe; in especial the Miltonic summit of the line,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity —
a line in which the words are borne on a rhythm which gives perhaps the grandest vibration, in all European literature, of a feeling of contact with what Dr. Otto calls the "numinous" and Emerson the "Oversoul". But Marlowe could have brought a power as splendid in its own way if more loose, an equal strength of voice if less volume and a less noble intonation. Though he was more sharp in his impact while Milton had more breadth, his own pinnacle —
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament
— is no whit inferior as imaginative poetry or weaker in essential force. He could also bring mass and volume —
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!—
yet these again have an element of keenness, of restlessness, which is unlike Milton's more collected grandeur. The difference results to a considerable extent from the fact that in Marlowe the dramatic and the epic tendencies were mixed together. Even when Milton's thunder came nearest the Elizabethan word-fury —
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms —
even when Milton composed a passage like that, he was
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most unMarlovian by his kind of tone, a mental and deliberate rhythm helped out by his inversions, his linked syntax, his length of poetic phrase. Still, in English poetry there can be found nothing outside Marlowe to measure its power: he alone catches again and again its vast dynamic, though he employs it in successive passionate outbursts where Milton marshals prolonged resonances: Marlowe has not the identical kind of tone, but he has the identical pitch. Moreover, he is ruled by that rebellious mood of the hero of Paradise Lost, from which the poem's terrible beauty is born. There are, throughout Paradise Lost, thousands of lines far removed from Marlowe's style: in fact the whole scheme of this epic is alien to Marlowe's mentality; yet the underlying Satanic megalomania and the boundless poetic Will to Power are close-allied to the "infinite" of Marlowe. It is in this sense that I conjecture the daimon-drive behind the dissimilarities of the two poets to be at heart one and the same.
2
If, like the inmost Marlowe's reincarnation in the Miltonic Sublime, the Soul within Shelley's soul could have repeated its essential nisus through a fit instrument, we should have had a poetic plenitude such as Shakespeare manifested. Not, however, Shakespeare's substance of drama nor his style's vibrant contact with the life-force. But, as I have hinted before, Shelley's daimon, like Shakespeare's, was in its own way one with its instrument and more than any other poet's was it capable of artistic abundance. Almost all that it touched became glorious, not by a massed incandescence of vital energy but by a rich rippling light of idealistic passion and spiritually suggestive thought. If there had been, later, any poet who could have held a kindred passion and thought in a fluent and ever-maturing freshness, Shelley's genius would not have failed of self-completion. That it tried, more than once, strikes me as plausible.
Swinburne had a supernormal fluency, a rapture of lyric
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rhythm, a plunging iridescence, which were a large and beautiful mould wherein, assimilating new attributes, Shelley's growth might have proceeded. He had even psychological affinities — a fusion of the romantic attitude with Greek culture, the resurgent idealism of a Prometheus, a love of intellectual and political freedom, a revolt against conventional morality and religion, a sense of the universal Spirit's plastic press. With so much in common between him and the older poet, it may seem amazing why the essential Shelley could not be continued and fulfilled in him. Some enrichment was inevitable, and it was in the direction of a more complex and comprehensive, a more orchestral lyricism. Shelley's magic had been simple in prevailing tones yet it had never lacked an implicit complexity, for it had never been simple in the Wordsworthian or the ballad manner. Its structural diversity and artistic manipulation of sound-effects had contained a living seed of the Swinburnian harmony. In Swinburne this seed sprouted in a royal fulfilment. But Shelley was not just fluent and lyrical; he was in addition always inspired with regard to his meaning, while Swinburne diluted too often his own, thus checking the growth that might have happened.
A serious technical difference helped to magnify this obstacle: his iridescence tended to be a haze because over and above his weakness of intellectual effort his words were not seldom subdued to a general harmonic scheme with too little particularisation for themselves: they scarcely assumed a definite and expressive outline, they were hastened with a swirl of vague adjective-colour along the impatient winding polyphony of his verse. Though this trait was not quite absent from Shelley — perhaps Arnold was moved to his protest on account of it — it was in truth on rare occasions that he was vague and void: what was mistaken for indefiniteness was his delicate perception and imaginative subtlety or, as in The Witch of Atlas, his sometimes exclusive play with themes far from the human and the palpable. On the psychological side, the one grave discrepancy which vitiated all resemblan-
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ces, however notable they might be, was that Shelley was not only aware of the universal Spirit nor merely content to feel and enjoy and increase its urge towards Love and Loveliness: he was vehemently athirst for an ideal and entire perfection, he was pursued by an extreme hunger for some luminous super-world, he was a man smitten with desire for Eternity in its own authentic thrill — in short, he was a mystic in disposition. Swinburne could not fulfil this essential nisus towards mysticism.
Shelley had not the definite mystic experience, but the tendency for it was ingrained in him, as proved by various long rhythm-rolls and short song-snatches, ranging from Prometheus Unbound to the fugitive yet unforgettable "I can give not what men call love." Perhaps the most unexpected and implicitly beautiful summary of it is in the Skylark. Oppressed by a sense of mortal finitude which serves as a bar against his spirit, condemned to care and piteous pining for "what is not", all his love and aspiration an exquisite pain, a cry of heart-shattering sweetness, the man in Shelley strains wonderingly up to the Skylark's "keen joyance" and "unpremeditated art", its "flood of rapture so divine". By a symbolic flash he discerns through the skylark's high and happy moments of unfettered gladness a possibility that each moment of life could bring such an experience if we had a vision which would enable us, as he imagines it enabling the bird in that strange soar, to "deem" of death "Things more true and deep/ Than we mortals dream". For, death to us incarnate creatures captive in a multitudinous woe seems a crowning misery whose terrible shadow haunts our whole life; but if we could have that vision, our hearts would sing and soar unhampered by pain and above death's shadow. So Shelley yearns for a mystic self-liberation, an "unbodied joy", a discovery by which one can live and yet be as if bodiless and beyond limitation, knowing life as a divine freedom and death a misfortune and a dreadful darkness to those alone who have not achieved this freedom. Where in Swinburne was to be found such a cry for spiritual insight?
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Swinburne knew the subtle earth-soul, even more the sea-soul; but Shelley had a transcendental vein in him besides the pantheistic, an aching eye towards Plato's Archetype as well as a dissolving gaze into Spinoza's Substance.
It is to Francis Thompson that we must turn for a recurrence of Shelley's transcendental touch — with important discontinuities in form, Thompson being a somewhat fanatical adherent to the Roman Church, yet with so basic a connection with Shelley that whenever he writes about Shelley the tone is as if he were dealing with an essential part of himself. The connection is basic because in Shelley's mind Plato of the Symposium and Dante of the Paradiso interfused: he burned with a spiritual idealism of thought, the lips of his love carried a flame-kiss from the fragmentary human heart to the Absolute Sun of Eternity. What, however, was still imprecise in him Thompson made clear and definite. Shelley's Intellectual Beauty with its awful command to his daimon from behind the veil became to Thompson the Hound of Heaven, a tremendous Lover with a grip as of flesh. What in a more personal mood Shelley had pictured, in the colourful transports running through Epipsychidion, as his all-consummating Archetype come down on earth, Thompson saw at a more authentic pitch of mysticism as the resplendent face of a Divine Virginity whom the child in him called Mother and the man in him Love. Thus Shelley's inmost attitude was matured.
There were also other factors conducive to a necessarily novel yet at bottom organic evolution of Shelley's genius. With Shakespeare as hors concours, Thompson stands with Shelley unparalleled for image-opulence, a never-ceasing dance and glitter of fancies, figures, fantasies — mists of dream, interblended hues of natural sight, sudden vistas of intimate revelation. His language is often steeped in the Shelleyan fire and rainbow and at its best seems borne on an uncontrollable wave. No better proof of remarkable openness of Shelley's daimon can be cited than Thompson's Buona Notte. In her last letter to Shelley, Jane Williams wrote: "Why
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do you always talk of never enjoying moments like the past? Are you going to join your friend Plato, or do you expect I shall do so soon? Buona Notte." Shelley was drowned two days after; and in Thompson's verses the poet's spirit addresses Jane while his body is tossing on the waters of Spezzia:
Ariel to Miranda: — Hear
This good-night the sea-winds bear;
And let thine unaquainted ear
Take grief for their interpreter.
Good-night! I have risen so high
Into slumber's rarity,
Not a dream can beat its feather
Through the unsustaining ether.
Let the sea-winds make avouch
How thunder summoned me to couch,
Tempest curtained me about
And turned the sun with his own hand out.
And though I toss upon my bed
My dream is not disquieted;
Nay, deep I sleep upon the deep,
And my eyes are wet, but I do not weep;
And I fell to sleep so suddenly
That my lips are moist yet — could'st thou see —
With the good-night draught I have drunk to thee.
Thou canst not wipe them; for it was Death
Damped my lips that has dried my breath.
A little while — it is not long —
The salt shall dry on them like the song.
Now know'st thou that voice desolate, —
Mourning ruined joy's estate, —
Reached thee through a closing gate.
'Go'st thou to Plato?' Ah, girl, no!
It is to Pluto that I go.
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This is no imitation, Thompson catches the very essence of Shelley in one aspect, there is a free and living tone which makes it genuine. The man who could write like that had something of Shelley in his own heart.
Elsewhere too, though more charged with his individual attributes, Thompson's poetry has often a Shelleyan undertone which again and again sings out, and it is an organic undertone, so to speak — as naturally Thompson as it is Shelley. A fine instance, in a single line, is
Tangle the tresses of a phantom wind.
Here is another, speaking about the heart's swift brightness
Whose robes are fluent crystal, crocus-hued,
Whose wings are wind a-fire, whose mantles wrought
From spray that falling rainbows shake to air.1
Or read the following — a yet finer coalescence of the two poets:
From cloud-zoned pinnacles of the secret spirit
Song falls precipitant in dizzying streams;
And, like a mountain-hold when war-shouts stir it,
The mind's recessèd fastness casts to light
Its learning multitudes, that from every height
Unfurl the flaming of a thousand dreams.
Even the Thompson who hurls forth the opening rhythms of The Hound of Heaven —
I fled Him down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
1. I take this and the preceding quotation after Mr. Mégroz who also discusses Shelleyan affinities in his admirable study: Francis Thompson: The Poet of Earth in Heaven.
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I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after —
even this Thompson is not in fact so far from Shelley as we might imagine; he has no locutions alien to the poet of Prometheus Unbound — the latter may not have used them all but they are in his vein; that "labyrinthine ways of my own mind" which Thompson's admirers have made much of has actually been anticipated in the Shelleyan phrase — "the deep and labyrinthine soul". There is a flash of power in Shelley often overlooked, and some of Thompson's moments offer the sole points of comparison with it. I recall one passage which comes rather close to the tone we find recurring in The Hound. After Thompson's fleeing soul has in vain sought security within its own self, sued
to all swift things for swiftness,
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind,
craved the fellowship of all Nature-moods and human joys and found that nothing would save it from that pursuing voice and is at last forced to yield, the conquering Power reveals to it life's deepest secret — the strange relentless love of God for man. The end of the poem sums up the whole theme beautifully:
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom after all,
Shade of His Hand, outstretched caressingly?
'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'
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The passage from Shelley which I have in mind depicts at the start quite the opposite process: the soul is now the seeker after an ideal Loveliness which is eluding it:
And as a man with mighty loss dismayed,
I would have followed, though the grave between
Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen:
When a voice said: — 'O thou of hearts the weakest,
The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest.'
Then I — 'Where?' — the world's echo answered 'where',
And in that silence and in my despair,
I questioned every tongueless wind that flew
Over my tower of mourning if it knew
Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul;
And murmured names and spells which have control
Over the sightless tyrants of our fate;
But neither prayer nor verse could dissipate
The night which closed on her; nor uncreate
That world within this Chaos, mine and me,
Of which she was the veiled Divinity...
Then as a hunted deer that could not flee,
I turned upon my thoughts, and stood at bay,
Wounded and weak and panting.
A certain force and idea-turn here strikes one as similar to Thompson's and the close by a sudden volte-face brings in an image analogous to that of hound-pursuit.
I do not suggest that Thompson's style is all Shelleyan, but that elements exist in the older poet which, brought into greater play, could grow a real strand in what we regard as Thompson's peculiar tensions of tone. His vivid and head-long massiveness, too, is not something of which Shelley was incapable. Lines large in rhythm as well as intrepid are to be met with in the Ode to the West Wind; and the Prometheus has here and there a fiery volume, so to speak, reminiscent of Thompson's hound-movement and his thunder in subsequent odes: a memorable comparison between rushing snow
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and Prometheus's defiance of false godheads is put into Asia's mouth —
The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass,
Thrice-sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.
The stanzas with which Demogorgon, the personation of Truth's hidden eternity, is made to close the drama yield also a proof of Shelley's power in the same direction — most in the lines:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of craglike agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
The special tinge which Thompson often gave to Shelley's power was a certain dithyrambic gorgeousness and to his subtlety a curious imaginative entanglement. In doing so, he brought a verbal daring which revived and invigorated archaisms, unfolded "purple" rarities, tossed about new-minted coin with a masterful hand. He has a way with words which reminds one of the Elizabethans' poetic enterprise and richness. He has not in his language the Elizabethans' quiver of the very stuff of sensation; but he has their burning grandiloquence and their vivid complexity. He is a genius who has put like the great masters his stamp upon poetic diction. Nobody writing after him can ignore the Thomson-effect — a bursting splendour, an ingenious swirl of hue and harmony. On almost any page he provides examples:
The long laburnum drips
Its honey of wild flame, its jocund spilth of fire
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is a Thompson-effect; these lines about the rose —
Lo, in yon gale which waves her green cymar,
With dusky cheeks burnt red
She sways her heavy head,
Drunk with the must of her own odorousness;
While in a moted trouble the vexed gnats
Maze, and vibrate, and tease the noontide hush —
are again a Thompson-effect; so also are the blank verses:
Though I the Orient never more shall feel
Break like a clash of cymbals, and my heart
Clang through my shaken body like a gong,
and the famous flight from the Hound:
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars,
Fretted to dulcer jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
More subdued though as typical are lines like
Or if white-handed light
Draw thee yet dripping from the quiet pools,
Still lucencies and cools,
Of sleep, which all night mirror constellate dreams.
Sometimes there is a complex figure:
I pleaded outlaw-wise
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
Trellised with intertwining charities.
Or the complex and the magnificent combine in a superb
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passage:
Oh! may this treasure-galleon of my verse,
Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme,
Set with a towering press of fantasies,
Drop safely down the time,
Leaving mine islèd self behind it far
Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas
(As down the years the splendour voyages
From some long ruined and night-submergèd star),
And in thy subject sovereign's havening heart
Anchor the freightage of its virgin ore;
Adding its wasteful more
To his own overflowing treasury.
So through his river mine shall reach the sea...
In all these quotations there are several phrases that have a ring of Shelley, and a few lines even seem to issue from his pen:
Draw thee yet dripping from the quiet pools...
Of sleep, which all night mirror constellate dreams;
Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas;
As down the years the splendour voyages.
Some others interblend the two poets, the Shelley-note still appreciable:
Lo, in yon gale which waves her green cymar;
Still lucencies and cools;
Trellised with intertwining charities;
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Leaving mine islèd self behind it far;
Anchor the freightage of its virgin ore.
In these mixed moments, the Thompson-note has something of Keats — a strain which is more marked when Shelley's is quite subdued, as in the description of the rose and the "vexed gnats", Thompson reaching there a perfection of what is called natural magic. The line,
Oh, may this treasure-galleon of my verse
belongs also to the Keatsian group, and
Clang through my shaken body like a gong
as well as
From some long ruined and night-submergèd star
have an undertone from Hyperion. Elsewhere too, in Thompson's verse, the Keats-note is repeatedly sounded — one might almost say he has assimilated Keats as much as Shelley; but his basic temperament is more akin to the latter, both in its mystical attitude and its plethora of successive images, so that the Keatsian element works under the stress of a Shelleyan inspiration, while both are taken up into a style which as a living whole is Thompson sheer and unique.
If his style were not individual, Thompson would not be the great poet that he is; but his greatness holds a special interest inasmuch as there was a subtle yet dominating stress in it showing him to be a fruitful starting-point for a further growth of Shelley's daimon.
I do not deny that several affinities other than that with Keats and the Elizabethans are traceable which cannot be called Shelleyan. That Keats and Shelley could intermingle
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without the least catastrophic consequence is evident, since both had a strong dash of Spenser: I could even undertake to show that one influence on the verse of Hyperion came from Prometheus Unbound. In the latter poem the Miltonic turn also is not absent, while the Shakespearean tone which, again, Keats sometimes practised, Shelley had expressed his intention of assimilating more successfully than in his Cenci and there is no reason to doubt that, with a greater maturing of his poetic thought-process, he would have done so. Thompson's style, therefore, was not on that side a development inimical to Shelley's daimon. What about the Crashaw-element so strong in Thompson at times? It was no obstacle either, for if Crashaw most resembled any poet it was, apart from Thompson, Shelley himself and to a lesser extent Blake. Donne and Patmore now remain: they are present — though more in the psychology than in the actual language of the style — in Thompson's later Odes; but with neither of them was he so much "a brother in song" as with Shelley — at least no great poetic outburst under their influence can be found to compare with his excellence at other times. The famous Anthem to Earth rises to authentic splendour of Thompson-effect where it has very little of their characteristic movement. All the same, when we inquire how it was that Thompson failed to take the Shelleyan element further to any sovereign fulfilment, these ancillary resemblances must be given their due place, for the particular promise with which he started got hampered by them.
Another hampering factor was Thompson's bent for rhetoric — rhetoric in an admirable conflagration at his best, but his best then was rather rare. And it was in the rhetorical vein that his mysticism also got far from Shelley's breadth: it seemed cast in a rigid mould, a too narrowly Christian temper, as much static as ecstatic, not flexible and comprehensive enough for Shelley's spirit which had been kindred to the Indian consciousness, whether moved by a pantheistic or a transcendental longing. The Christian temper affected Thompson's powerful sense of Nature also: he had a distinct
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pantheistic emotion, yet whenever the rhapsodical slipped into the rhetorical it was sicklied o'er with a vision of the death's-head everywhere in too unpantheistic a way for the essential Shelley's wistful and even sad but never morbid outlook. Thus even Thompson's mysticism, while making Shelley's more maturely definite, brought in limitations.
In the sphere of style, a certain overloading of words, a too thick surge or too nebulously rich spray of sound, an exaggerated intricacy or explosiveness of image-rush were defects attendant upon the Shelley-coloured qualities that he developed. The development was unquestionable: he intensified by his bold and splendorous dithyrambic movement Shelley's exoticism, creating a texture of word and image most oriental, and in doing so he enriched and widened the expressive range of Shelley's essence. This was a gain as undeniable as bringing Shelley's mysticism to a focus, but, just as a narrowing down in psychology happened there, so here the mistake he committed was to allow his style to become either brightly diffuse and haphazard or turbidly dazzling — two extremes which always are to be feared by the oriental penchant. At least the second extreme could have been avoided if he had thrilled more with a lyric flow; and this insufficiency told against the Shelleyan genius in him: he had an impetuous flow which that genius could take wonderful advantage of, but it was not markedly lyrical. He was a passionate and sonorous artist at times; still, the unfailing lyric grace which could have made his fluency more continual and more in tune with Shelley's daimon was not his forte. What gave the last and heaviest blow to his Shelleyan promise was that he not merely lacked the lyric cry which Shelley had sinuously melodised and Swinburne orchestrated: his fluency itself for all its odic power worked by fire-spurts soon consuming themselves and he had not a sustained gift of building with a large and symmetrical hand. The spacious energy which fashioned Prometheus Unbound and rendered The Cenci — however wanting in personal life — a feat of dramatic construction, could discover no crowning
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outlet through a fine yet sporadic strength.
Thus Thompson failed as Swinburne did, though for different reasons. Nevertheless, a side of Shelley got developed in him too, despite accompanying defects. And I venture to prophesy that if ever some poet carries on the Shelleyan nisus, he would incarnate the poetic gains that nisus has acquired through Thompson no less than Swinburne. In trying to find a new lease of activity, Shelley's genius kept growing and its fresh attributes should be now one with its nature and, if some fluent mould were found, there would be poured in it a manifold harmony together with a plastic melodious stream and, besides the harmonic surge, an oriental audacity of colour, an adventurous and creative and re-shaping word-passion. There would be interwoven with his uniqueness something of the original Shelley, something of Swinburne, something of Francis Thompson. But he must fight free, on the one hand, of an inclination to dilute his meaning and haze off his expressive units and, on the other, of a lapse into unorganised though abundant thought-stuff and objectionably archaic or precious or new-fangled word-surprise. And if in addition to a fully controlled and sculptured grace he proves capable of a vast architectural inspiration, he would accomplish in his own mystic domain what even a Shakespeare, sovereign of the life-force, might envy.
Questions to Sri Aurobindo
1. Is my essay up to the mark?
2. Does the theory I have expounded and illustrated in this article hold water? As part of literature it may be perfectly legitimate, but is there any chance of its being true?
Sri Aurobindo's Answers
1. Yes.
2. What is exactly your theory? There is one thing — influences — everybody undergoes influences, absorbs them
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or rejects, makes them disappear in one's own developed style or else keeps them as constituent strands. There is another thing — Lines of Force. In the universe there are many lines of Force on which various personalities or various achievements and formations spring up — e.g. the line Pericles-Caesar-Napoleon or the line Alexander-Jenghis-Tamerlane-Napoleon — meeting together there — so it may be too in poetry, lines of poetic force prolonging themselves from one poet to another, meeting and diverging. Yours seems to be a third — a Daimon or individual Spirit of Poetry migrating from one individual to another, several perhaps meeting together in one poet who gives them all a full expression. Is that it? If so, it is an interesting idea and arguable.
17.2.1935
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