POETS AND POLITICS.

(Spectator.)

 THE most dissimilar things are often found to be closely related to each other. Toryism and Democracy, if Lord Randolph Churchill is not mistaken, are an instance in point. Politics and Poetry have a more assured connection, though they are quite as unlike. One concerns practical and immediate things, the fleeting aspects of the day, the rivalries of men and systems ; the other is not of the day, but of all days—it concerns the deeper problems of life and the higher truths of the imagination. These are points of difference more apparent, it must be said, than real ; but there is something that reconciles them, it is the quality of human nature common alike to poetry and to politics, and from which both of them derive their deepest interest. When a poet like William Morris becomes an active exponent of Socialism, we feel at first a shock of surprise. There seems to be such an utter incongruity between mediæval and classic romance and modern revolution, that the phenomenon bewilders us. But we remember that a poet is above all men an enthusiast, and that of all enthusiasms the enthusiasm of humanity is the most absorbing to poetic sensibilities, and the anomaly is thus in some measure explained.

The same enthusiasm conduced in Shelley to even more extravagant results. But Shelley was always a creature of impulse. It was only in relapses from a state of passionate fervour that he cultivated a placid muse. Yet this fierce enthusiasm of humanity redeems in him the flagrant excesses it occasions. In Byron it is wholly redeeming and exalting. It inspired the only ambition in his life for which his life and poetry were the better. But the age of Byron and Shelley was one, in England, of class-privilege and intolerance ; on the Continent, of desperate and just revolt—an age when there needed no Socialistic imagination to discover grievances or invent tyrannies. Coleridge, in his youth, and even Southey, shared the ardour of the time, though with them it did not last long. Their pantisocratic aspirations were never very serious, and the little family arrangement to be carried out on the banks of the Susquehanna could not have affected anyone outside his own small circle. But Coleridge, in one of his finest odes, has recorded the effect upon himself of the spirit of revolution :—

When France her giant limbs upreared

And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and

sea,

Stamped her strong foot and said she would be

free,

Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared !

Before the time when these reminiscences were written down, the poet had exchanged the passion of hope for the condition of philosophic calm. If is rather by philosophy than passion that freedom may be understood ; but it does not help us much to know that the poet, after all, found it "on the sea-cliffs verge"—

Possessing all things with intensest love,
O Liberty ! my spirit felt thee there.

It would have been strange had it not ; and it may be that it was best to turn at once from the horrors which the ode recapitulates to the repose of nature—but it would have been more courageous if the poet had put in contrast with the anarchist travesty of liberty that true liberty to which a distressed nation might aspire.
 England is no longer a distressed nation. She has passed in her time through terrible revolutions ; she has achieved mighty reforms ; and whatever may still be wanting to her perfect well being, she is already the freest and most enlightened country of the globe. Surely, then, it might be thought, this is a time when the poet should again take to the pipe of peace. We look to him to help us to keep our freedom, to instruct us in the use of it, to lead us in the pursuit of those higher gains and pleasures to which it ministers—but we no longer look to him for a war-cry. Mr. William Morris, however, thinks that a war-cry is still needed, and that it is the office of the poet to supply it. If Mr. Swinburne's revolutionary utterances are not purely academical, he may be supposed to agree with him,—though, unlike Mr. Morris, who is prepared to head the fray, he is content to leave the fighting to others. Mr. Morris accordingly suspends—if he has not finally abandoned — his devotion to mediæval romance, and seeks an earthly paradise in an impossible future, instead of again finding it in a legendary past which his genius made real. Let us say that we entirely respect his motives, while we lament the ends to which his labours are directed. We honour even the mistaken enthusiasm of humanity that sways the poet ; but we cannot too much regret the mischievous excesses into which it betrays him. He sees only the end he desires, an end which his imagination invests with colours of its own and with qualities only possible in a community of minds like his own. The methods and intermediate details, of which the impassioned advocate does not pause to take account, are devised by other men,—not poets, often not enthusiasts, sometimes desperate and unscrupulous schemers. Whatever may be its final aims, Socialism involves in some of its stages revolution, spoliation, the subversion of all reasonable law ; and these are not things which we would willingly associate with the name of William Morris.
 But it must not be supposed that poets, in their relation to politics, are always impracticable and extravagant. They are pioneers of reform by the strength of their sympathies ; and it is in the power of the poet, beyond all other men, to evoke sympathy and beget enthusiasm. But we do not need to be always reforming, any more than children should be always learning the alphabet. We think we have done fairly well, so well that we may even take a little rest, and it is provoking to be told that the fighting has yet all to come. We turn from Mr. Morris and Mr. Swinburne, when they tell us so, to the wiser counsels of the poet-laureate. He lacks nothing of the true enthusiasm of humanity. The social hopes of men have never been more vividly expressed than in the stirring verses of "Locksley Hall." Nor has English patriotism ever found a bolder voice, whether for defiance or defence, and whether against a common foe outside or usurpation and intolerance at home. Again and again, in times of national heat, when the hearts of the whole people have been moved by one strong passionate impulse, he has interpreted the common feeling as no one else could. "I have felt with my native land," he says ; "I am one with my kind." And now, in a time of partial repose, when the ground won is an assurance of the easy conquest of what remains to be won, it is he who best tells us where we stand, and what England is :—

A land of settled government,
 A land of just and old renown,
 Where Freedom broadens slowly down
From precedent to precedent.

Thus, in four terse lines he gives us a perfect account of our legislative system and its result—that result of social order and constitutional freedom which distinguishes us among all nations. If the younger poets will be admonished by Lord Tennyson, they will not "feed with crude imaginings wild wild hearts and feeble wings." There are two factors in political and social life of which the Laureate makes much, and the younger poets very little. These are knowledge and reverence. "Make knowledge circle with the winds," says the elder poet, "but let her herald, Reverence, fly before her." It is not conceivable that if the Socialists would get knowledge and practise reverence, they would persist in their present endeavours. We do not claim reverence for classes or class interests, as such, but we do claim it for those principles of order, and justice, and mutual observance, upon which society is founded, and without which it could not exist. Extremists always assume themselves to be well informed when they possess only the little knowledge which is proverbially dangerous. With more complete enlightenment they would shun the perilous courses in which they run blindly:—

Certain, if knowledge bring the sword,
That knowledge takes the sword away.

The Laureate, only a few months ago, returned to the subject of the poems from which we have quoted, in a poem on "Freedom," published in "Macmillan's Magazine." With more force, if possible ; with even greater dignity, if that might be ; with a deeper sense of the responsibility of the voice that spoke, the now aged poet again invoked that true freedom he had sung many years before :—

O scorner of the party cry,
.   .   .   .   .   .
Thou loather of tho lawless crown
 As of the lawless crowd ;

How long thine over-growing mind
 Hath stilled the blast and strown the wave,
Though some of late would raise a wind
To sing thee to thy grave.

Men loud against all forms of power—
 Unfurnished brows, tempestuous tongues—
Expecting all things in an hour—
 Brass mouths and iron lungs.

These are strong words, and some of them cannot be applied to Mr. William Morris. But he appears to give the sanction of his name and genius to the schemes of men to whom they are altogether applicable. On the subject of Socialism we have little more to say. We are at one with the Socialists in their demand for freedom of speech ; we would join them in any effort to better, by legitimate means, the condition of any class that may still be suffering and overweighted ; but in regard to the order and systems they would uproot, we share the Laureates grateful reflection—

                                               We are a people yet;
Though all men else their nobler dreams forget,
Confused by brainless mobs and lawless powers ;
Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set
His Briton in blown seas and storming showers.


Brisbane Courier (Qld. : 1864 - 1933), Saturday 5 December 1885, page 9