I

THE ROMANTIC DEFENCE OF POETRY

RAYMOND MACDONALD ALDEN

Professor of English, Stanford University

T is a matter of common knowledge that the critics of the Renaissance inherited from the medieval period the problem of the

ethical justification of poetry, and attempted to solve it in certain characteristic ways. The most characteristic medieval solution was allegory: the tales of poets were made symbols of moral and spiritual truths. The characteristic Renaissance solution was what may be called Aristotelian idealism; namely, the doctrine that poetry is morally nobler and more efficacious than history, because it presents ideal or general truth instead of particular facts. This position was held tenaciously throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and indeed has never become obsolete. A somewhat different solution, appealing to a smaller number of critics, of more mystical temperament, might be called Platonic idealism,-the doctrine that earthly beauty is always an adumbration of heavenly beauty, and hence that poetry, in revealing it, is perpetually leading one to higher things. This was much closer to medieval feeling than the doctrine with which I have compared it. It provided, for such men as the Italian neo-platonists, an interesting means of refuting Plato's prejudices against poets out of his own mouth. But it is less important for later criticism than the Aristotelian argument, not only because it was less widely used-and more by poets than critics-but because it tends to base the defence of poetry on matters of religion rather than of morality.

The standard neo-classic doctrine of the morality of poetry (I use "neo-classic" to cover the Renaissance period and the later periods which maintained the same critical doctrines) may be briefly exemplified by one or two familiar passages, in order to have it before our minds for comparison with later ideas. The purpose of poetry, said Scaliger, is to teach delightfully (docere cum delectatione) 1-a notion often connected, of course, with Horace's 'See Spingarn, Lit. Crit. in the Renaissance, p. 52.

miscuit utile dulci; to which Minturno, in his work De Poeta, added the function of moving to admiration (and, implicitly, to imitation) of the ideal persons whom the poet describes.1 In England Sir Philip Sidney and Francis Bacon represent the same position, in statements which have become classic.

It is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by. . . . Whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done. ... For even those hard-hearted evil men. . . will be content to be delighted . . . and so steal to see the form of goodness (which seen they cannot but love) ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine of cherries. (Defense of Poesy.)

Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical; because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution and more according to revealed providence: . . . so as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. (Advancement of Learning.)

Beyond this position criticism can scarcely be said to have advanced, up to the end of the eighteenth century. It should also be noted that these arguments of the neo-classic school are based almost wholly on narrative poetry, the form which remained dominant, except when its supremacy was threatened by the satiric, didactic, or expository types, throughout the same period. Exceptions may be found, for instance, Sidney's remarks on the stirring qualities of a war-song; but in general, as we know, the terms poetry and fiction. were almost interchangeable in the period in question, and the imagination was thought of as the faculty which conceived persons and actions transcending experience. It is much more than a coincidence, then, that in the later period, when lyric poetry rapidly became the dominant type, a new defence of poetry was created accordingly.

I am no lover of the term "romantic," the meaning of which no mortal has ever yet ascertained, and would gladly have avoided it in the title of this paper. But it is obvious that there are certain qualities and tendencies observable in the poetry of the age of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley (to speak of England alone), which 1Ibid., p. 52.

are intimately related with each other and with the theory of poetry held by the same writers and many of their contemporaries. For these qualities and tendencies the word "romantic" is a convenient term, in general use. Now in the period and among the writers in question, we are all conscious that a new attitude appears respecting the relations of imaginative literature and morality. In part it is a matter of silence: the men of this age are not concerned, or do not condescend, to defend the utilities of poetry. When they speak of its two aspects or effects, pleasure and goodness, they are likely to seem much more interested in the former, and less in the latter, than their predecessors of the neo-classic era; and sometimes they explicitly state that to give pleasure is the characteristic, if not the sole, function of poetry, with moral utility a mere byproduct, an indirect or incidental gratuity. If pressed to answer the question whether poetry ministers to the moral nature in a definite way, they are pretty certain to take the affirmative side; but they explain what they mean in partially new and often tantalizingly vague terms. They do not point to the example of noble persons, stimulating the reader to imitation, like the critics of the Renaissance. They do not talk, like Sidney, of poetry pleasurably concealing instruction as cherries may conceal medicine. And as for that sort of poetry which is explicitly expository of moral ideas, they are averse to admitting that it is poetic at all. The nature of the claim which they make for the moral values of poetry-especially lyrical -appears to be connected closely with certain other doctrines respecting the character of the poetic process. I suppose that these things have been remarked by every one; but it is curious that no one seems to have undertaken to analyze them definitely. The fact is that under the romantic influences, now dominant for more than a century, critics interested in the history of imaginative art (with a few more or less erratic exceptions like Ruskin and Tolstoy) have had comparatively little interest in its relations with ethics; and formal ethical criticism rarely throws much light on literature.

The chief names for our subject, in the period where it is naturally centered, are Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, the three poets who represented the most conscious intellectual aspects of the romantic school, whose interests were ethical as well as imaginative, and who wrote not only poetry but important criticism. We should expect, I suppose, to find more material in Coleridge

than in either of the others, because of his well known and farreaching philosophic interests; but this would be a mistake. He was a metaphysician (or aspired to be), but not an ethicist, and says very little respecting the relation of poetry to morality, though a good deal respecting its relation to philosophic truth. One of the numerous works which he projected but never brought to pass was a treatise on Poetry, and it appears from certain of his letters that in this treatise he would have established the fundamental unity of poetry and morality. On October 9, 1800, he wrote: "Its title would be an essay on the elements of poetry; it would be in reality a disguised system of morals and politics." (Letters, p. 338.) And again on February 3, 1801: "I have faith that I do understand the subject, and I am sure that if I write what I ought to do on it, the work would supersede all the books of metaphysics, and all the books of morals too." (p. 347.) From such passages we might be unprepared to find him declaring, as he does repeatedly (e. g., in the Biographia and in various lecture fragments), that the one main function of poetry is to give pleasure, without any clear inference from pleasure to morals. Yet, though Coleridge does not seem to have defined his views on this matter explicitly, no one familiar with his criticism can doubt that he everywhere assumed the moral, as well as the esthetic and philosophic, efficacy of the poetic process.

The clue to this implication is probably to be found in his doctrine of the imagination. To interpret this as an instrument of morality may be to read something into Coleridge's account from what we find in the accounts of others, notably Wordsworth and Shelley; but this is a legitimate device, in view of the links, both external and internal, which connect the various poets of the romantic group. In his Lay Sermon on "The Statesman's Manual" Coleridge defined the imagination as "that reconciling and mediatory power which, incorporating the reason in images of the senses,

gives birth to a series of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial of the truths of which they are the conductors." (Bohn ed., p. 321.) This concerns primarily-like most of his remarks on the same subject-the operations of the imagination as an instrument for the revelation of truth; but that this revelation has a specifically moral value is implied not only by the whole course of the argument but by certain passages specifically. For

example take the passage in which, just as the romantics found the sources of the decay of poetry in the eighteenth-century age of reason, Coleridge goes to the same place for the source of spiritual and moral decay: "It seems to have been about the middle of the last century, under the influence of Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, say generally of the so-called encyclopædists, . . . that the human understanding, and this too in its narrowest form, was tempted to throw off all show of reverence to the spiritual and even to the moral powers and impulses of the soul; and, usurping the name of reason, openly joined the banners of Antichrist." (Ibid., P. 346.)

What Coleridge implies and suggests, Wordsworth sets forth with some clearness. The substantial identity of his doctrine with that of his friend is due, of course, to the fact that to some extent they worked it out together. Like Coleridge, Wordsworth affirms that the primary function of poetry is to please, and in enumerating "the powers requisite for the production of poetry" (opening of the Preface of 1815) he does not include either a theoretical or a practical mastery of morality. But, like Coleridge again, he emphasizes the dignity and the penetrative power of the imagination in a way to suggest moral values, and in his famous statement that "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge" may naturally be thought to include ethical knowledge with the rest. But his really characteristic position respecting our problem is of a somewhat different character. It concerns not so much the imaginative as the emotional aspect of poetry, and is implied in the numerous passages in which he refers to the peculiar "sensibility" of the poet. In some sense the training of the feelings, by appropriate exercise, is for him a highly important function of the poetic art; and we are enabled to infer the moral significance of this training by recalling some of his most characteristic poems, such as "Simon Lee" and "Resolution and Independence," in which he seeks to exemplify it with special clearness. The great Preface to the Lyrical Ballads touches on the subject in one passage, and in a single sentence (a most ungainly one, which ought to be two or three) gives us, I think, the heart of the matter. The poet is explaining why his ballads, though extremely simple in form, are to be distinguished from poems accused of "triviality and meanness of thought." One ground of distinction is that each of them will be found to have “a