University of Virginia Library

“Poesie ist das absolut Reelle. Dies ist der Kern meiner Philosophie.
Je poetischer, je wahrer.”

—Novalis (Schriften, vol. iii. p. 171).

In the present work, and in the works which have preceded it from the same pen, an attempt is made to combine two qualities which the modern mind is accustomed to regard apart—reality and mystery, earthliness and spirituality; and this combination, whether a merit or a fault, is a consequence of natural temperament, and perfectly incurable. The writer dropped into a world a few years ago like a being fallen from another planet. His first impression was one of surprise and awe;—he stood and wondered—and here, on the same spot, he stands and wonders still. What is nearest to him seems so sublime, unaccountable, and inexhaustible, and occasionally, indeed, so droll and odd, that he has never ceased to regard it with all the eyes of his soul from that day to this. Others may go to the mountain-tops and interrogate the spheres. Wiser men may peruse the Past, and see there, afar away, the dreamy poetry for which the spirit eternally yearns. More acquiescent men may look heavenward, slowly and strangely losing the habit of earthly perception altogether. With all these, with all who love beauty near or afar away, in any shape or form, abides the twofold blessing of reverence and love. But the Mystic is occupied hopelessly with what immediately surrounds him. Minuter examination leads only to extremer joy

and wonder. To him this ever-present reality is the only mystery, and in its mystery lies its sublime fascination and beauty. Only what is most real and visible and certain is marvellous, and only that which is marvellous has the least fascination. What he sees may be seen by every soul under the sun, for it is the soul's own reflection in the river of life glassed to a mirror by its own speed.

This close examination of human nature from the mystic side is not so common that men will tolerate it calmly. “What is the dullard looking at?” cries the passer-by; “what are these wretched beings who surround him?—costermongers, thieves, magdalen-women, village schoolmasters, nomads,—what is the sentimentalist trying to find among these? He floods them with the light of his own vacant mind, and calls that light their souls!” So the speaker passes on—to the heights of the Alps, perhaps, where he finds communion; God communicating with all men somewhere. A more elaborate person pauses next before the Mystic. “The man is in error,” is his criticism; “he would fain prove himself an artist, but art deals only with things beautiful,—with remote forms of nature, with the dreamy past, with antique turns of thought, with what is essentially exquisite in itself—and it has, moreover, a terminology quite at variance with ordinary speech. Man yearns to the unknown and illimitable, and demands distance in the subjects of his art.” And this other goes his way, grateful to God for Greece and Italy, and for Lessing and Winkelman. Meantime the poor criticised barbarian has not budged. He looks on into the eyes nearest to him, and ah! what distance does he not find there? Approaching each creature as ever from the mystic side, he becomes, in spite of himself, an optimist. The moment he seizes or examination is the divine moment, when the creature under examination—be it Buonaparte or a street-walker, Bismarck or “Barbara Gray”—is at its highest and best,

whether that “best” be intellectual beatification or the simple vicarious instinct which merges in the identity of another. He sees the nature spiritualised, in the dim strange light of whatever soul the creature possesses. This light is often very dim indeed, very doubtful—so doubtful that its very existence is denied by non-mystic men whose musings assume the purely spiritual and unimaginative form. But be the teaching true or false, be the light born in the subject examined or in the human sentiment that broods over it, this mystic approach to the creature at his highest point of spiritualisation, this mode of approach which seems unnatural to many because it involves the most minute enumeration of details and the most careful display of the very facts of life which artists try most to conceal, is the only procedure possible to the present writer. The personal key-note to all his work— poor enough, God knows, is all that work from his own point of view—is to be found in the “Book of Orm,” and most of all in the poem entitled “The Man Accurst.”

Imagination is not, as some seem to imply, the power of conjuring up the remote and unknowable, but the gift of realising correctly in correct images the truths of things as they are and ever have been. He who can see no poetry in his own time is a very unimaginative person. The truly imaginative being is he who carries his own artistic distance with him, and sees the mighty myths of life vivid yet afar off, glorified by the truth which is Eternal. How many people can walk out on a starry night, or sit by the side of the sea, unmoved? But let a comet appear, or a star shoot, and they exclaim, “How beautiful!” Let a whale rise up in the water and roar, and they think, “How wonderful are the works of God!” These are the people, and their name is legion, who lack as yet the consecrating gleam of the imagination. As for the Mystic, he needs neither a comet nor a whale to fill his soul with a sense of the wonderful; he needs still less the dark vistas of tradition or the archaic scenery of

obscure periods. He comes into the world, as has been said, like a man dropped from the moon, and he walks all his life as among wonderful beings in a strange clime. How far has he not wandered, how far has he not yet to wander?—and every face he sees is turned in the same direction. Faces! how they haunt them with their weird beauty and divine significance! Go where he may, his path swarms with poetic forms. All is glorified and awful. What is nearest seems of all the most sublime and unaccountable. It is with difficulty that he can bear any book or contemplate any painted picture, seeing what books and pictures present themselves in the strangely-coloured lives of his fellow-beings. He turns to history—not in disdain of what exists, but in search of explanation and corroboration, and in order to discover what part of the strange show there is perishable, what part is durable and eternal. Having as he thinks discovered that, he may become a poet, and put on record his own idea or autobiography, written in reference to his own time, but to be used in all after-times as explanatory and corroborative. Homer, the Greek tragedians, Aristophanes, Plato, David and the prophets, the authors of the Sagas and Lieds, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, William Langdale, Chaucer, the ballad-singers of Scotland and England, Ben Jonson, Shakspere, La Fontaine, Burns, Wordsworth, Jean Paul, Balsac, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman,—do we find any of these men, poets all of them, turning away from his own time because it is too uninteresting? or, on the contrary, do we find them penetrating to the very soul of it, stirring to every breath of it, uttering every dream and aspiration of it? Does Dante try to write like Virgil, though he sits at Virgil's feet? Does Chaucer ape Boccaccio, though he wears the Decameron next his heart? Does Ben Jonson reproduce Plautus or La Fontaine Rabelais? Does Burns, having drunk Scotch ballads into his soul, sing as the ballad-writers sang? Do we find Wordsworth seeking for subjects far back in the dark ages? Has Shelley so little imagination as to reproduce Greek tragedy as it was, or so much imagination as to make of his “Prometheus” a veritable modern poem [in spite of the falsehood and shallowness of the myth it preserves] with a distinctly modern purpose and scope?

“But,” some one again interposes, “this is such an unpoetic age, and the surroundings of modern life are so vulgar.” The writer understands this objection, and there is reason in it. The majority of people find their ordinary associations vulgar and unpoetic, and like to be lured away from them and interested. So much the worse, alas! for the majority. But let it be at once admitted that the poet fails altogether if he fails to lure readers and interest them as they desire. He is no mere moral teacher, but a singer of the beautiful, and his real business in this world is not to join in a chorus raised by any group of people, but to explain some point of beauty which has rested altogether hidden until his advent. If people are unimaginative, he comes to teach them imagination: if people dislike modern subjects, he comes to make them like modern subjects. If ordinary people perceived the sublime mysteries of contemporary life, if ordinary people understood the faces and souls they behold daily, it would be a waste of time to sing to them. If men in general understood the higher historical issues and perceived the higher poetry of the siege of Paris, what good would it be to celebrate it in song? And this poem, for example, fails altogether—is veritably less than nothing—is a futility, a mere wind-bag—if it does not make the reader feel the events it describes as he never, by any possibility, felt them before.

In the “Drama of Kings,” as in “London Poems,” “Inverburn,” and “Meg Blane,” in the presentment of the characters of Buonaparte, Louis Napoleon, and Prince Bismarck,—as in the characters of “Nell,” “Liz,” “Meg Blane,” and the rest,—one point of view is adopted; not

the point of view of the satirist, nor that of the politician, nor that of the historian; but that of the realistic Mystic, who, seeking to penetrate deepest of all into the soul, and to represent the soul's best and finest mood, seizes that moment when the spiritual or emotional nature is most quickened by sorrow or by self-sacrifice, by victory or by defeat. In good honest truth, the writer has had far greater difficulty in detecting the spiritual point in these great leaders than in the poor worms at their feet. The utterly personal moods of arbitrary power, the impossibility of self-abnegation for the sake of any other living creature, the frightful indifference to all ties, the diabolic supremacy of the intellect, make the first Emperor a figure more despairing to the Mystic than the coster girl dying in childbed in a garret, or the defiant woman declaiming over the corpse of her deformed seducer. It is this sense of the superlatively diabolic that has made the author, in the Epilogue, attribute the performance of the three leading characters to Lucifer himself;—only let it be understood not to the irreclaimable and Mephistophelian type of utter evil, but to the Mystic's Devil, a spirit difficult to fathom individually, but clearly in the divine service working for good. Perhaps, by the way, the supernatural machinery of Prelude and Epilude is a defect, like all allegory; and if the consensus of wise criticism inclines to its condemnation as a defect, it will be obliterated, no author having a right to resist the wish of his readers where their dislike corresponds with a doubt of his own. But if it serves to keep before the reader the fact that the whole action of the drama is seen from the spiritual or divine auditorium, he will not regret its introduction; and in using it without perfect faith, he may plead the example of the greatest poetic sceptic of modern times. No one did fuller justice to mystic truths than the great positivist who wrote the first and second “Fausts.”

Concerning the mere form of the poem and its resemblances

to the Greek, little need be said. It is the first serious attempt ever made to treat great contemporary events in a dramatic form and very realistically, yet with something of the massive grandeur of style characteristic of the great dramatists of Greece. In minor points of detail the author is sanguine that it is not at all Greek, nor in any sense of the word archaic. The interest is epic rather than tragic; but what the leading character is to a tragedy France is to the “Drama of Kings,”—a wonderful genius guilty of many sins, terribly overtaken by misfortune, and attaining in the end perhaps to purification. It is unnecessary to add any more by way of explanation, save to say that most of the metrical combinations used in the choruses are quite new to English poetry, and that where a measure is employed which has been used successfully by any previous poet, the fact is chronicled in the notes.

One word in conclusion. For this new experiment in poetic realism, the writer asks no favour but one—a quiet hearing. He has a faint hope that if readers will do him the honour to peruse the work as a whole, and then patiently contemplate the impression left in their own minds, the first feeling of repulsion at an innovation may give place in the end to a pleasanter feeling. Perhaps, however, this is too much to ask from any member of so busy a generation, and he should be grateful to any one who will condescend to read the “Drama” in fragments.

Die Masse könnt ihr nur durch Masse zwingen;
Ein Jeder sucht sich endlich selbst was aus.
Wer vieles bringt, wird manchem etwas bringen,
Und Jeder geht zufrieden aus dem Haus. . . .
Was hilft's, wenn ihr ein Ganzes dargebracht!
Das Publicum wird es euch doch zerpflücken.
Robert Buchanan.