The Bones of a Poem
The Speaker, August 17, 1901



A Commentary on Tennyson's "In Memoram." By A.C. Bradley, L.L.D. London: Macmillan and Co. 4s. 6d.

There is nothing to be said against the attempt to boil a poem down to metaphysics, except that it is the most valuable and veracious part of the poem which goes off in the steam. Mr. A. C. Bradley is not indeed by any means in ignorance of this nameless and elusive element in literature; he says with considerable truth and sense in his preface, "This suggestiveness or untranslateable meaning attaches to a definite mental matter, namely images and thoughts, the outlines of which should be clear to us, however little we may be able to exhaust their significance. We read for the most part half asleep, but a poet writes wide awake." And Mr. Bradley has selected an excellent example of poetic difficulty in devoting himself to In Memoriam. It is remarkable that Browning should have the name of an obscure and Tennyson of a lucid poet, when there are certainly passages of In Memoriam which are very much more difficult to understand than the mass of Browning's philosophical poetry. Browning's speech was quaint and twisted and tail foremost, but it was never vague. One of his sentences is like a dragon with his tail in his mouth; one of Tennyson's is often like a resplendent cloud that has neither head nor tail. The speaker in "Sordello" is like an excited man telling us something very important in an incomprehensible dialect. The speaker in In Memoriam is often like a man talking to himself about things of which we have never heard.

Properly speaking, indeed, Tennyson was more typically the poet of thought than Browning. He really attached primary importance to speculative ideas and passionless meditations upon theories about deity and immortality. In the case of Browning we feel rather that he loved a speculation as he loved a sunrise or a gallop on horseback, because it was a man's business to love as many things as he could. He was a theologian, not because he thought the next world more important than this, but because he found this world all the more important since it contained theology. Browning had literally a passion about ideas; an actual human appetite. Tennyson had not a passion about ideas, he had ideas about passion. Since therefore In Memoriam has so strongly intellectual a character, a great interest attaches to the attempt of Mr. Bradley to detach the thread of metaphysics in it from the gorgeous and coloured threads of description and metaphor. But Mr. Bradley is struggling with a hopeless task, and he apparently knows it. The task would be quite simple if poetry really were what it has in most ages of classical criticism been conceived to be, a decoration or beautification of thought by simile and example. But herein has lain the great error that has so much falsified criticism in this matter. Poetry is not a selection of the images which will express a particular thought; it is rather an analysis of the thoughts which are evoked by a certain image. The metaphor, the symbol, the picture, has appeared to most critics to be a mere ornament, a piece of moulding above the gateway: but it is actually the key-stone of the arch. Take away the particular image employed and the whole fabric of thought falls with a crash. It is not the thought that is the deep or central thing, one might almost say that it is the phrase. In "In Memoriam," for example, there is a description incomparably vague and perfect of the empty and idle mood often produced by sorrow:

"The stars, she whispers, blindly run,
A web is woven across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry 
And murmurs from the dying sun"

We turn to Mr. Bradley's perfectly reasonable and sympathetic explanation and we find that this passage means "the doubt whether the world is not the meaningless and transitory product of blind necessity." Doubtless it means that, but surely it means a great deal more. If this mere intellectual proposition were fundamentally what was involved, we should read Mr. Bradley instead of reading Tennyson. The fact is, that the metaphors of the passage, the stars, the web, the murmurs of the sun, are not mere illustrations, they are the original part of the thought. The idea of the world as a chance product has often been uttered, what is new and thrilling in the matter is the fact that the waste places and the cry of the dying sun make the idea so suddenly vivid to us that it ceases to become a thought, and becomes a feeling. The phrases are strange and almost monstrous: the poet has to speak of a sun that murmurs, and a cobweb across the sky like that which the old woman swept away in the nursery rhyme. But a certain intense conception of cosmic futility was never expressed until those two or three queer words were joined together, and may never be expressed again if they are put asunder.

We may go further than this. The language of metaphysics is invariably and inevitably clumsy, because it is bound to class together moods and mental attitudes which while they are one, if expressed in terms of philosophy, would be found to be a hundred and one if they were expressed in music or landscape or literature. We speak of pessimism or idealism or a "transitory product of blind necessity": but when we come to actual states of feeling we find that one pessimism may differ from another as much as heaven from hell. The attitude of Walt Whitman could scarcely differ more from that of Schopenhaur than one thing that we call melancholy differs from another that we call melancholy or one thing that we call joy differs from another that we call joy.  So it is with the instance from In Memoriam I have quoted above. Mr. Bradley's explanation of the verse is that it represents a "doubt whether the world is not the meaningless and transitory product of blind necessity." But as a matter of fact it represents only one kind of doubt, one mood of hesitation on this point. It represents a frame of mind which I should not attempt to describe in prose (to do so would destroy my own thesis), but the nature of which may be vaguely indicated by saying that it depicts a certain ghastly indolence of sorrow, an aching sterility in the hours, the sorrow of an endless afternoon. Mr. Bradley's doubt as to the world being meaningless might be entirely of a different kind, and require expression by entirely different images. It might, for example, be a bitter and dramatic revolt against the mystery and chaos of the world, instead of a mechanical acquiescence, sick with the simplicity and obviousness of the world's evil. It might be rightly represented, not by waste places and a setting sun, but by ruined heavens and the stars shaken down like hail-stones. Pessimism is not always inane and drifting, like the kind here described by Tennyson; pessimism is sometimes courageous; strange as it may seem, it is sometimes cheerful. The good done by sceptical philosophers, indeed, has almost always resolved itself into the fact that while they were pessimists about everything else they were optimists about their own opinions: they might be living in the worst of all possible worlds, but they were the best of possible judges of it. Between this kind of fighting, inspiriting pessimism and the empty and floating kind described above in the verse from In Memoriam, there are innumerable shades and gradations, every one of which is a separate religion. Not only are there blue, green, and crimson types both of joy and melancholy, but there is every tint of green and every tint of crimson. Yet pure verbal philosophy has no vocabulary for these degrees: it has the same word for a pessimism that drives a man to commit suicide and a pessimism that drives him to the Earl's Court Exhibition. It is, as it were, still speaking of things in the gross classes of animal, vegetable, and mineral, while art has found a definition for the cowslip and a worthy name for the eagle.

This is the fundamental difficulty, therefore, with which Mr. Bradley has to contend in compiling his book. He tries to convey the substance of a passage by stripping away the ornaments and the verbiage, and he finds he has nothing left but the shadow. The process resembles a sort of conjuring trick in which a man should tear off the hat and coat of a man and fling them out of the window, and then discover that they remained in his hands, and it was the man that he had thrown away. For poetry is not an ornamental and indirect way of stating philosophy but a perfectly simple and direct way of stating something that is outside philosophy. There are fleeting and haphazard sights of nature that are words out of an unknown dictionary: every sunset might have founded a separate creed.

When due allowance has been made for this inherent difficulty in the whole of Mr. Bradley's attempt, there is little but praise to be given to his analysis. In one sense, In Memoriam is a work which it is especially profitable to study in detail, since not only has the whole poem a noble structure and development, but every section has a noble structure and development, and could stand, from rise to climax, as a separate poem. This unity built up of unities is one of the most perfect pieces of pure literary workmanship ever achieved. The metre, of course, is an inspiration, the two central lines falling with an almost weary harmony and the last line like an echo of something distant, a sound heard years before. Above all, it is needless to say, it is the noblest monument ever raised, a sepulchre so high as to be a cathedral for all men. And it is devoted to the expression of the most profound and stirring paradox that experience ever grew certain of, the paradox that a man can never really be miserable if he has known anything worth being miserable for. Sorrow and pessimism are by their natures opposite: sorrow rests upon the value of something; pessimism upon the value of nothing.