No More Learning

After all, and at the worst, I have only attempted, in respect
to Milton, what the Greek dramatists achieved lawfully in respect to
Homer. They constructed dramas on Trojan ground; they raised on the
buskin and even clasped with the sock, the feet of Homeric heroes; yet
they neither imitated their Homer nor emasculated him. The Agamemnon of
AEschylus, who died in the bath, did no harm to, nor suffered any harm
from, the Agamemnon of Homer who bearded Achilles. To this analogy--the
more favourable to me from the obvious exception in it, that Homer's
subject was his own possibly by creation,--whereas Milton's was his own
by illustration only,--I appeal. To this analogy--_not_ to this
comparison, be it understood--I appeal. For the analogy of the stronger
may apply to the weaker; and the reader may have patience with the
weakest while she suggests the application.

On a graver point I must take leave to touch, in further reference to my
dramatic poem. The divine Saviour is represented in vision towards the
close, speaking and transfigured; and it has been hinted to me that the
introduction may give offence in quarters where I should be most
reluctant to give any. A reproach of the same class, relating to the
frequent recurrence of a Great Name in my pages, has already filled me
with regret. How shall I answer these things? Frankly, in any case. When
the old mysteries represented the Holiest Being in a rude familiar
fashion, and the people gazed on, with the faith of children in their
earnest eyes, the critics of a succeeding age, who rejoiced in Congreve,
cried out "Profane. " Yet Andreini's mystery suggested Milton's epic; and
Milton, the most reverent of poets, doubting whether to throw his work
into the epic form or the dramatic, left, on the latter basis, a rough
ground-plan, in which his intention of introducing the "Heavenly Love"
among the persons of his drama is extant to the present day. But the
tendency of the present day is to sunder the daily life from the
spiritual creed,--to separate the worshipping from the acting man,--and
by no means to "live by faith. " There is a feeling abroad which appears
to me (I say it with deference) nearer to superstition than to religion,
that there should be no touching of holy vessels except by consecrated
fingers, nor any naming of holy names except in consecrated places.
As
if life were not a continual sacrament to man, since Christ brake the
daily bread of it in His hands! As if the name of God did not build a
church, by the very naming of it! As if the word God were not,
everywhere in His creation, and at every moment in His eternity, an
appropriate word! As if it could be uttered unfitly, if devoutly! I
appeal on these points, which I will not argue, from the conventions of
the Christian to his devout heart; and I beseech him generously to
believe of me that I have done that in reverence from which, through
reverence, he might have abstained; and that where he might have been
driven to silence by the principle of adoration, I, by the very same
principle, have been hurried into speech.

It should have been observed in another place,--the fact, however, being
sufficiently obvious throughout the drama,--that the time is from the
evening into the night. If it should be objected that I have lengthened
my twilight too much for the East, I might hasten to answer that we know
nothing of the length of mornings or evenings before the Flood, and that
I cannot, for my own part, believe in an Eden without the longest of
purple twilights. The evening, =erev=, of Genesis signifies a
"mingling," and approaches the meaning of our "twilight" analytically.
Apart from which considerations, my "exiles" are surrounded, in the
scene described, by supernatural appearances; and the shadows that
approach them are not only of the night.

The next longest poem to the "Drama of Exile," in the collection, is the
"Vision of Poets," in which I have endeavoured to indicate the necessary
relations of genius to suffering and self-sacrifice. In the eyes of the
living generation, the poet is at once a richer and poorer man than he
used to be; he wears better broadcloth, but speaks no more oracles: and
the evil of this social incrustation over a great idea is eating deeper
and more fatally into our literature than either readers or writers may
apprehend fully. I have attempted to express in this poem my view of the
mission of the poet, of the self-abnegation implied in it, of the great
work involved in it, of the duty and glory of what Balzac has
beautifully and truly called "la patience angelique du genie;" and of
the obvious truth, above all, that if knowledge is power, suffering
should be acceptable as a part of knowledge. It is enough to say of the
other poems, that scarcely one of them is unambitious of an object and a
significance.

Since my "Seraphim" was received by the public with more kindness than
its writer had counted on, I dare not rely on having put away the faults
with which that volume abounded and was mildly reproached. Something
indeed I may hope to have retrieved, because some progress in mind and
in art every active thinker and honest writer must consciously or
unconsciously make, with the progress of existence and experience: and,
in some sort--since "we learn in suffering what we teach in song,"--my
songs may be fitter to teach. But if it were not presumptuous language
on the lips of one to whom life is more than usually uncertain, my
favourite wish for this work would be, that it be received by the public
as a step in the right track, towards a future indication of more value
and acceptability.