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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Aesthetic Poetry, by Walter Pater
+#13 in our series by Walter Horatio Pater
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+Title: Aesthetic Poetry
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+Author: Walter Horatio Pater
+
+Release Date: July, 2003 [Etext #4207]
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+AESTHETIC POETRY+
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+
+[213] THE "aesthetic" poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greek
+or medieval poetry, nor only an idealisation of modern life and
+sentiment.  The atmosphere on which its effect depends belongs to no
+simple form of poetry, no actual form of life.  Greek poetry,
+medieval or modern poetry, projects, above the realities of its time,
+a world in which the forms of things are transfigured.  Of that
+transfigured world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates
+beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally
+an artificial or "earthly paradise."  It is a finer ideal, extracted
+from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal.  Like
+some strange second flowering after date, it renews on a more
+delicate type the poetry of a past age, but must not be confounded
+with it.  The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion of
+home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of
+escape, which no actual form of life [214] satisfies, no poetry even,
+if it be merely simple and spontaneous.
+
+The writings of the "romantic school," of which the aesthetic poetry
+is an afterthought, mark a transition not so much from the pagan to
+the medieval ideal, as from a lower to a higher degree of passion in
+literature.  The end of the eighteenth century, swept by vast
+disturbing currents, experienced an excitement of spirit of which one
+note was a reaction against an outworn classicism severed not more
+from nature than from the genuine motives of ancient art; and a
+return to true Hellenism was as much a part of this reaction as the
+sudden preoccupation with things medieval.  The medieval tendency is
+in Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, the Hellenic in his Iphigenie.
+At first this medievalism was superficial, or at least external.
+Adventure, romance in the frankest sense, grotesque individualism--
+that is one element in medieval poetry, and with it alone Scott and
+Goethe dealt.  Beyond them were the two other elements of the
+medieval spirit: its mystic religion at its apex in Dante and Saint
+Louis, and its mystic passion, passing here and there into the great
+romantic loves of rebellious flesh, of Lancelot and Abelard.  That
+stricter, imaginative medievalism which re-creates the mind of the
+Middle Age, so that the form, the presentment grows outward [215]
+from within, came later with Victor Hugo in France, with Heine in
+Germany.
+
+In the Defence of Guenevere: and Other Poems, published by Mr.
+William Morris now many years ago, the first typical specimen of
+aesthetic poetry, we have a refinement upon this later, profounder
+medievalism.  The poem which gives its name to the volume is a thing
+tormented and awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere defending
+herself from the charge of adultery, and the accent falls in strange,
+unwonted places with the effect of a great cry.  In truth these
+Arthurian legends, in their origin prior to Christianity, yield all
+their sweetness only in a Christian atmosphere.  What is
+characteristic in them is the strange suggestion of a deliberate
+choice between Christ and a rival lover.  That religion, monastic
+religion at any rate, has its sensuous side, a dangerously sensuous
+side, has been often seen: it is the experience of Rousseau as well
+as of the Christian mystics.  The Christianity of the Middle Age made
+way among a people whose loss was in the life of the senses partly by
+its aesthetic beauty, a thing so profoundly felt by the Latin hymn-
+writers, who for one moral or spiritual sentiment have a hundred
+sensuous images.  And so in those imaginative loves, in their highest
+expression, the Provencal poetry, it is a rival religion with a [216]
+new rival cultus that we see.  Coloured through and through with
+Christian sentiment, they are rebels against it.  The rejection of
+one worship for another is never lost sight of.  The jealousy of that
+other lover, for whom these words and images and refined ways of
+sentiment were first devised, is the secret here of a borrowed,
+perhaps factitious colour and heat.  It is the mood of the cloister
+taking a new direction, and winning so a later space of life it never
+anticipated.
+
+Hereon, as before in the cloister, so now in the chateau, the reign
+of reverie set in.  The devotion of the cloister knew that mood
+thoroughly, and had sounded all its stops.  For the object of this
+devotion was absent or veiled, not limited to one supreme plastic
+form like Zeus at Olympia or Athena in the Acropolis, but distracted,
+as in a fever dream, into a thousand symbols and reflections.  But
+then, the Church, that new Sibyl, had a thousand secrets to make the
+absent near.  Into this kingdom of reverie, and with it into a
+paradise of ambitious refinements, the earthly love enters, and
+becomes a prolonged somnambulism.  Of religion it learns the art of
+directing towards an unseen object sentiments whose natural direction
+is towards objects of sense.  Hence a love defined by the absence of
+the beloved, choosing to be without hope, protesting [217] against
+all lower uses of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian.  It is the
+love which is incompatible with marriage, for the chevalier who never
+comes, of the serf for the chatelaine, of the rose for the
+nightingale, of Rudel for the Lady of Tripoli.  Another element of
+extravagance came in with the feudal spirit: Provencal love is full
+of the very forms of vassalage.  To be the servant of love, to have
+offended, to taste the subtle luxury of chastisement, of
+reconciliation--the religious spirit, too, knows that, and meets just
+there, as in Rousseau, the delicacies of the earthly love.  Here,
+under this strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air,
+exotic flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote and
+unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light
+almost shining through them.  Surely, such loves were too fragile and
+adventurous to last more than for a moment.
+
+That monastic religion of the Middle Age was, in fact, in many of its
+bearings, like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses: and a
+religion which is a disorder of the senses must always be subject to
+illusions.  Reverie, illusion, delirium: they are the three stages of
+a fatal descent both in the religion and the loves of the Middle Age.
+Nowhere has the impression of this delirium been conveyed as by
+Victor Hugo in Notre Dame de Paris.  The [218] strangest creations of
+sleep seem here, by some appalling licence, to cross the limit of the
+dawn.  The English poet too has learned the secret.  He has diffused
+through King Arthur's Tomb the maddening white glare of the sun, and
+tyranny of the moon, not tender and far-off, but close down--the
+sorcerer's moon, large and feverish.  The colouring is intricate and
+delirious, as of "scarlet lilies."  The influence of summer is like a
+poison in one's blood, with a sudden bewildered sickening of life and
+all things.  In Galahad: a Mystery, the frost of Christmas night on
+the chapel stones acts as a strong narcotic: a sudden shrill ringing
+pierces through the numbness: a voice proclaims that the Grail has
+gone forth through the great forest.  It is in the Blue Closet that
+this delirium reaches its height with a singular beauty, reserved
+perhaps for the enjoyment of the few.
+
+A passion of which the outlets are sealed, begets a tension of nerve,
+in which the sensible world comes to one with a reinforced brilliancy
+and relief--all redness is turned into blood, all water into tears.
+Hence a wild, convulsed sensuousness in the poetry of the Middle Age,
+in which the things of nature begin to play a strange delirious part.
+Of the things of nature the medieval mind had a deep sense; but its
+sense of them was not objective, no real escape [219] to the world
+without us.  The aspects and motions of nature only reinforced its
+prevailing mood, and were in conspiracy with one's own brain against
+one.  A single sentiment invaded the world: everything was infused
+with a motive drawn from the soul.  The amorous poetry of Provence,
+making the starling and the swallow its messengers, illustrates the
+whole attitude of nature in this electric atmosphere, bent as by
+miracle or magic to the service of human passion.
+
+The most popular and gracious form of Provencal poetry was the
+nocturn, sung by the lover at night at the door or under the window
+of his mistress.  These songs were of different kinds, according to
+the hour at which they were intended to be sung.  Some were to be
+sung at midnight--songs inviting to sleep, the serena, or serenade;
+others at break of day--waking songs, the aube or aubade.*  This
+waking-song is put sometimes into the mouth of a comrade of the
+lover, who plays sentinel during the night, to watch for and announce
+the dawn: sometimes into the mouth of one of the lovers, who are
+about to separate.  A modification of it is familiar to us all in
+Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers debate whether the song they hear
+is of the nightingale or the lark; the aubade, with the two other
+great forms of love-poetry then floating in the world, the sonnet and
+the [220] epithalamium, being here refined, heightened, and inwoven
+into the structure of the play.  Those, in whom what Rousseau calls
+les frayeurs nocturnes are constitutional, know what splendour they
+give to the things of the morning; and how there comes something of
+relief from physical pain with the first white film in the sky.  The
+Middle Age knew those terrors in all their forms; and these songs of
+the morning win hence a strange tenderness and effect.  The crown of
+the English poet's book is one of these appreciations of the dawn:--
+
+     "Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
+         Think but one thought of me up in the stars,
+     The summer-night waneth, the morning light slips,
+        Faint and gray 'twixt the leaves of the aspen,
+             betwixt the cloud-bars,
+     That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:
+         Patient and colourless, though Heaven's gold
+     Waits to float through them along with the sun.
+     Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,
+         The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
+     The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
+     Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn,
+     Round the lone house in the midst of the corn.
+         Speak but one word to me over the corn,
+         Over the tender, bow'd locks of the corn."
+
+It is the very soul of the bridegroom which goes forth to the bride:
+inanimate things are longing with him: all the sweetness of the
+imaginative loves [221] of the Middle Age, with a superadded
+spirituality of touch all its own, is in that!
+
+The Defence of Guenevere was published in 1858; the Life and Death of
+Jason in 1867; to be followed by The Earthly Paradise; and the change
+of manner wrought in the interval, entire, almost a revolt, is
+characteristic of the aesthetic poetry.  Here there is no delirium or
+illusion, no experiences of mere soul while the body and the bodily
+senses sleep, or wake with convulsed intensity at the prompting of
+imaginative love; but rather the great primary passions under broad
+daylight as of the pagan Veronese.  This simplification interests us,
+not merely for the sake of an individual poet--full of charm as he
+is--but chiefly because it explains through him a transition which,
+under many forms, is one law of the life of the human spirit, and of
+which what we call the Renaissance is only a supreme instance.  Just
+so the monk in his cloister, through the "open vision," open only to
+the spirit, divined, aspired to, and at last apprehended, a better
+daylight, but earthly, open only to the senses.  Complex and subtle
+interests, which the mind spins for itself may occupy art and poetry
+or our own spirits for a time; but sooner or later they come back
+with a sharp rebound to the simple elementary passions--anger,
+desire, regret, [222] pity, and fear: and what corresponds to them in
+the sensuous world--bare, abstract fire, water, air, tears, sleep,
+silence, and what De Quincey has called the "glory of motion."
+
+This reaction from dreamlight to daylight gives, as always happens, a
+strange power in dealing with morning and the things of the morning.
+Not less is this Hellenist of the Middle Age master of dreams, of
+sleep and the desire of sleep--sleep in which no one walks, restorer
+of childhood to men--dreams, not like Galahad's or Guenevere's, but
+full of happy, childish wonder as in the earlier world.  It is a
+world in which the centaur and the ram with the fleece of gold are
+conceivable.  The song sung always claims to be sung for the first
+time.  There are hints at a language common to birds and beasts and
+men.  Everywhere there is an impression of surprise, as of people
+first waking from the golden age, at fire, snow, wine, the touch of
+water as one swims, the salt taste of the sea.  And this simplicity
+at first hand is a strange contrast to the sought-out simplicity of
+Wordsworth.  Desire here is towards the body of nature for its own
+sake, not because a soul is divined through it.
+
+And yet it is one of the charming anachronisms of a poet, who, while
+he handles an ancient subject, never becomes an antiquarian, but
+animates his [223] subject by keeping it always close to himself,
+that betweenwhiles we have a sense of English scenery as from an eye
+well practised under Wordsworth's influence, as from "the casement
+half opened on summer-nights," with the song of the brown bird among
+the willows, the
+
+        "Noise of bells, such as in moonlit lanes
+     Rings from the grey team on the market night."
+
+Nowhere but in England is there such a "paradise of birds," the fern-
+owl, the water-hen, the thrush in a hundred sweet variations, the
+ger-falcon, the kestrel, the starling, the pea-fowl; birds heard from
+the field by the townsman down in the streets at dawn; doves
+everywhere, pink-footed, grey-winged, flitting about the temple,
+troubled by the temple incense, trapped in the snow.  The sea-touches
+are not less sharp and firm, surest of effect in places where river
+and sea, salt and fresh waves, conflict.
+
+In handling a subject of Greek legend, anything in the way of an
+actual revival must always be impossible.  Such vain antiquarianism
+in a waste of the poet's power.  The composite experience of all the
+ages is part of each one of us: to deduct from that experience, to
+obliterate any part of it, to come face to face with the people of a
+past age, as if the Middle Age, the Renaissance, the eighteenth
+century had not been, is as impossible as to become a little [224]
+child, or enter again into the womb and be born.  But though it is
+not possible to repress a single phase of that humanity, which,
+because we live and move and have our being in the life of humanity,
+makes us what we are, it is possible to isolate such a phase, to
+throw it into relief, to be divided against ourselves in zeal for it;
+as we may hark back to some choice space of our own individual life.
+We cannot truly conceive the age: we can conceive the element it has
+contributed to our culture: we can treat the subjects of the age
+bringing that into relief.  Such an attitude towards Greece, aspiring
+to but never actually reaching its way of conceiving life, is what is
+possible for art.
+
+The modern poet or artist who treats in this way a classical story
+comes very near, if not to the Hellenism of Homer, yet to the
+Hellenism of Chaucer, the Hellenism of the Middle Age, or rather of
+that exquisite first period of the Renaissance within it.  Afterwards
+the Renaissance takes its side, becomes, perhaps, exaggerated or
+facile.  But the choice life of the human spirit is always under
+mixed lights, and in mixed situations, when it is not too sure of
+itself, is still expectant, girt up to leap forward to the promise.
+Such a situation there was in that earliest return from the
+overwrought spiritualities of the Middle Age to the earlier, more
+ancient life of the senses; and for us the most attractive form of
+[225] classical story is the monk's conception of it, when he escapes
+from the sombre atmosphere of his cloister to natural light.  The
+fruits of this mood, which, divining more than it understands,
+infuses into the scenery and figures of Christian history some subtle
+reminiscence of older gods, or into the story of Cupid and Psyche
+that passionate stress of spirit which the world owes to
+Christianity, constitute a peculiar vein of interest in the art of
+the fifteenth century.
+
+And so, before we leave Jason and The Earthly Paradise, a word must
+be said about their medievalisms, delicate inconsistencies, which,
+coming in a poem of Greek subject, bring into this white dawn
+thoughts of the delirious night just over and make one's sense of
+relief deeper.  The opening of the fourth book of Jason describes the
+embarkation of the Argonauts: as in a dream, the scene shifts and we
+go down from Iolchos to the sea through a pageant of the Middle Age
+in some French or Italian town.  The gilded vanes on the spires, the
+bells ringing in the towers, the trellis of roses at the window, the
+close planted with apple-trees, the grotesque undercroft with its
+close-set pillars, change by a single touch the air of these Greek
+cities and we are at Glastonbury by the tomb of Arthur.  The nymph in
+furred raiment who seduces Hylas is conceived frankly in the spirit
+of Teutonic romance; her song is of a garden [226] enclosed, such as
+that with which the old church glass-stainer surrounds the mystic
+bride of the song of songs.  Medea herself has a hundred touches of
+the medieval sorceress, the sorceress of the Streckelberg or the
+Blocksberg: her mystic changes are Christabel's.  It is precisely
+this effect, this grace of Hellenism relieved against the sorrow of
+the Middle Age, which forms the chief motives of The Earthly
+Paradise: with an exquisite dexterity the two threads of sentiment
+are here interwoven and contrasted.  A band of adventurers sets out
+from Norway, most northerly of northern lands, where the plague is
+raging--the bell continually ringing as they carry the Sacrament to
+the sick.  Even in Mr. Morris's earliest poems snatches of the sweet
+French tongue had always come with something of Hellenic blitheness
+and grace.  And now it is below the very coast of France, through the
+fleet of Edward the Third, among the gaily painted medieval sails,
+that we pass to a reserved fragment of Greece, which by some divine
+good fortune lingers on in the western sea into the Middle Age.
+There the stories of The Earthly Paradise are told, Greek story and
+romantic alternating; and for the crew of the Rose Garland, coming
+across the sins of the earlier world with the sign of the cross, and
+drinking Rhine-wine in Greece, the two worlds of sentiment are
+confronted.
+
+[227] One characteristic of the pagan spirit the aesthetic poetry
+has, which is on its surface--the continual suggestion, pensive or
+passionate, of the shortness of life.  This is contrasted with the
+bloom of the world, and gives new seduction to it--the sense of death
+and the desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickened by the sense
+of death.  But that complexion of sentiment is at its height in
+another "aesthetic" poet of whom I have to speak next, Dante Gabriel
+Rossetti.
+
+1868.
+
+NOTES
+
+213. +This essay appeared only in the 1889 edition of Appreciations.
+
+219. *Fauriel's Histoire de la Poesie Provencale, tome ii. ch. xviii.
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Aesthetic Poetry, by Walter Pater
+
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