Poetry and Belief

Poetry has been as much primitive to man, as belief has been instinctive. In the absence of revealed religion, men invented their own rituals to satisfy their instinctive urge to sing and worship. Those were the days when poetry was identified with ritualistic songs sung on the altars. But as time rolled on, men became slaves to one another; they soon discovered that their human gods were far more powerful than their wooden gods and naturally they dedicated poems to them. How much their personal belief was behind those works of art, it is difficult to say. Nevertheless, Shah Namah remains to be one of the masterpieces of world literature, in spite of the fact that Firdausi wrote it under the above circumstances. Dryden, who is revalued and regarded as one of the greatest poets by some of the greatest critics of our age, was so volatile with regard to his belief that it is difficult to ascertain whether religious belief had any importance for him at all. That happens when poets become professional time-servers. But ‘yes-men’ like Dryden are rare in the world of fine arts. That is never the character of any artist. Poverty had been ever their lot, but seldom they had left off their ideals in which they believed for the sake of worldly comforts. But as in our own days painters are employed for small sums to do petty works in the absence of works leading them to their ideals satisfying to their souls, so also poets were employed in the past and were told precisely what to tell. Yea the greatest of such artists were such that they kept their own in spite of the odds, and even to some extent made their own religion out of the religion they were born with. Such poets had a prophetic vision. Perhaps, each one of us believes in a religion from his own individual standpoint. But in spite of our individualism about us, we are much the same as our other co-religionists, partly because we never bother and partly because we are afraid of some trouble. But a poet like Milton who believes in a religion and keeps that belief over and above everything else, is at once prophetic. He begins to scratch the bundle open with his scrutinizing vision. And so he rose very much above his milieu by dint of sheer hard-won greatness. His faiths and beliefs have long been discussed with a view to categorising him into one or the other sect. Till about forty years ago, he was regarded generally as a rather narrow and thorough-going Protestant with a leaning towards the Old Testament interpreted “fundamentally”. Then the Americans showed how much he had in common with the Classical and Stoical doctrines of the Renaissance, while Prof. Liljegren carried the notion to an extreme by painting him a second Machiavelli. But Denis Saurat came out with his fascinating plea for Milton as a daring and orthodox thinker. As regards his Puritanism, Raleigh says: “His guiding star was not Christianity, but that severe self-centred ideal of life and character which is called Puritanism.” But it was again Grierson who pointed out that Milton’s main doctrines expressed in the Paradise Lost are those of Evangelical Protestantism.

In short, one is almost bewildered and is at a loss to find a clear path into his theology, and one cannot go further than say: “It is Milton’s Paradise Lost, lost by Milton’s Adam and Eve, who are tempted by Milton’s Satan and punished by Milton’s God”; or in the words of Coleridge, “John Milton is himself in every line of Paradise Lost.”

But the question is, what is John Milton? John Milton is certainly not John Dryden, who would change his faith to suit the times. Milton in that case was a rock, whereas Dryden was a straw in the current. But the rock inevitably suffers for being a rock than the straws. Milton’s sufferings in his own time were of a different kind. At least his own people were sporting enough to allow him the greatness which he well-deserved, though they allowed it with a vengeance. He enjoyed his partial greatness till very late. Even Hopkins who called him a ‘Bad man’ admitted that “His achievements are quite beyond any other English poets, perhaps any other modern poets.”

But the wor1d of critics did not remain the same. The so-called civilisation of ours brings more and more hypocrisy. Hopkins was frank enough to call Milton a bad man because Milton was not a Catholic, but acknowledged his greatness as a poet. But now there are critics who regard poetry first and foremost, a poetry of belief. But when they would not tolerate Milton’s belief, they would discreetly find fault with his art. That, Milton’s sensuousness was withered by book-learning, his language is artificial and conventional, in fact he writes English like a dead language; that, all in him is sacrificed to a musical effect, with the occasional debasement of poetry into a solemn game–are a few of the charges that have been levelled against Milton. When the London Bridge was falling down, it was necessary that not only the crowds flowing over it should fall, but that the old graves should be dug out and the significant corpses brought out and depreciated so as to suit the modern stature, which has been significantly small due to the increase of population with a stunted mentality. We get such a glimpse in the statement of Prof. Hutchinson: “The main obstacle to the full appreciation of Paradise Lostby the reader today is the absolute and unattractive nature of much of Milton’s theology. The Aenied does not suffer seriously from our not accepting Virgil’s traditional Mythology. It is a little more difficult when Milton presents his own strongly Puritan and individual interpretation of a Christian tradition which still maintains a hold upon many of his readers.”

So, there lies the fault–not in the work of art itself but in the belief of the writer, as though we were great believers ourselves! It is not faith that is at the bottom of the modern criticism of Paradise Lost; it is the lack of faith. For a man of faith recognises another man of faith wherever he is and however contrary his views be. It is only a faithless man that does not appreciate any man of faith. The traditional mythology of the Aenied does not disturb us because we go to the Aenied as though we go to the zoo, for going to the zoo is part of our fashionable context. But going to Milton is like going to the Church, and those who never go to their own Churches would hardly like the idea of going to any other Church–much less Milton’s Church. The ultra-modern method would be to find fault with his art. In short, it means that all the readers of poetry today are now guided by the world of fashions; and the world of fashions is the world of depraved morality. “Belief in such an age of scepticism is a matter of self-conscious operations.”

So, poetry which once started with rituals, has now to face the problems of supply and demand. “The contemporary poet, who is not merely a composer of graceful verses, is forced to ask himself such question as ‘what is poetry for?’ not merely “What am I to say? but rather how and whom to say?” And since these questions are raised by the greatest poet-critic of our age, they carry the maximum seriousness. But nevertheless, this is a new problem that once upon a time was only placed before the political orator. The poets never had to pose and act to put on appearances like the public speaker. Even the Metaphysi­cals whose belief to them were an ordering of experience, never faced such a problem. The Romantics were so individualistic that they hardly were conscious of this problem. It was as though, with the decline of the traditional belief, men were making a religion from the spirituality of their own experience under the protection of Nature.

But Romanticism was not merely a revolution against the old set of beliefs. It was the revolution of each against all. Each poet valued his own experiences to a degree, which it is difficult to parallel in the earlier poets. Like the Pre-Raphalites they were also unequally uniform. Undoubtedly the “Renaissance of wonder” like the “Revival of the Past”, had its naive and spontaneous as well as its conscious and speculative interpreters; it had its Blake and its Byron besides its Coleridge, as the other had its Scott and its Landor besides its Schelling. But in the poetry of all of them life had been seen through a new perspective and was a unique vision. Such a diversified glamour could never care a bit, who they were writing for or whether their poetry had any use at all. Mathew Arnold who was the dying product of this age, pointed out that poetry is not religion, but a capital substitute for religion. And Mr. T. S. Eliot, in his usual manner observes: “Not invalid port, which may lend itself to hypocrisy, but coffee without caffeine and tea without tanin.” That      is how he came across the formation of poetic faith in the criticism of Coleridge, and that is why he could afford to define ‘belief’ negatively as the ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’

Wordsworth whose mysticism was similar to that of Vaughan, was pre-eminently a Nature-mystic. He was at one with Plato when he said that “All knowledge is recollection,” and too, Vaughan’s “Retreat” can be seen containing the more or less similar ideas, that we get in the Immortality Ode. But while Plato discarded the senses, because they deceive us, Wordsworth clings to them as being the only source of experience.

So, mysticism which is the most salient feature of Wordsworthian poetry, is primarily based on sensuousness. He was tragic, but he was not pessimistic. And this was because he had his faith that every flower “enjoys the air it breathes”. He has been appreciated from different points of views. From the first, he is regarded as the poet of a peculiar mystic ideal who disclosed in the “rapt communion with Nature and undreamed of access into the life of things” (Myres). To the second and larger group represented by Arnold, Wordsworth’s interest lies not in his mystic idealism, but in his subtle fidelity the ‘bare sheet penetrating power’ of his description of Nature. The third one too exclusively values those elements in poetry which are least allied to realism–the imaginative dreams of old times:

“Of old unhappy far off things;
And battles long ago”

–lines laden with the spirit of romance, stand out for them like isolated points of fire. Both Mr. Swinburn and Mr. Watts have given unmeasured praise for such passages. Yet, over and above everything, Lord Russel writes of Wordsworth: “In his youth he sympathised with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period he was ‘bad man’. Then he became ‘good’, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry. “But this kind of analysis will lead us nowhere. Some of the greatest of poets had rather ugly private lives (though there are quite a few exceptions). Man could seldom act up to his beliefs and ideals. Nevertheless, he could write about them. The poet is not necessarily a moral being.

Keats, who like the young Lochinvar ‘rode all unarmed and all alone,’ ever remained the humblest devotee to poetry. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” this immediately converted watchword, his life seem to have contradicted at the very outset. Moneta rightly said of him:

Thou art a dreaming thing.
The fever of thyself: think of the earth.

But ultimately he was convinced that

“Verse, Fame and Beauty are intense indeed
But death intenser–Death’s life’s high mead”

–and this is how he was labelled as the Love and Beauty mystic. All the same, with Shelley, Byron and Landor, he had a taste for Hellenism. In this age, it was the most strange blend of the republican and the artist. They turned their eyes to ancient Greece and medieval Italy.

Shelley who was always on the extremes, was altogether on the side of existence. He believed that every cloud and sheaf of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy. He represented in short, a revolt of the normal against the abnormal; he found himself, so to say, in the heart of a wholly topsy-turvied and blasphemous world in which Godrevolted against Satan. This was the belief; worked up the extent of hallucinations, that was at the root of his such intense loves and hates. To him again Greece was also the first historic land of freedom, “the motherland of the free, the fatherland of the exiles.” “I will teach thine infant tongue,” wrote Shelley in 1817 to call upon those heroes ofold in their language.” And Shelley to whom all medieval mythology presented itself only as a “superstition” found in the myths of Greece a world in which his imagination could range and his profound religious instincts body itself, secure from the paralysing virus of theological strife. In Shelley and in Byron Hellenism was thus sharply opposed to the medievalism of the earlier Romantics of Coleridge, of Scotts.

So where was the need for religious beliefs? All the intensity of their personal belief was transferred from religions to their art and experience, quite irrespective of the fact whether they had a public demand or not.

Coming down to the Victorian era, we find that men have a tendency to recapitulate the values. The laxity of morals of George IV and his courtiers had its reactions over the puritan public, and under the reign of the sober Queen they meant to settle down with quietude. So Carlyle set up the conventional moral standards. Science, on the other hand, which proved rival since the 16th century of religion and art, now provided the very type of morality that was essentially Counter-Romantic. Tennyson who is the most representative poet of this age, is caught in the tangle of this conflict between science and religion and science and arts. On the one hand his Lotus-eaters preach for a life of ease and comfort in the Lotus land and mean to escape this world; on the other Ulysses forever sings, “To follow knowledge like a sinking star.” Yet, both this attitudes are important and true so far as they give us the truth about the age. The philosophy of the Lotus-eaters is as true as the philosophy of the life of Ulysses. The Lotus-eaters have realised that toil as they would, strive as they will, there was still the chance of going down and be destroyed. So, what was the use of rushing at things? Let them lead an easy-going life similar to that of the flowers–and be dead at last. Moreover, the gods in heaven are not a bit kind towards the earthlings. They mock at their failures and laugh at their sufferings. And death often enough puts an abrupt end to the busy stir of life; to the high hopes and mighty dreams. And if ever those dreams were fulfilled, how long could they exist? There is nothing which is lasting. The evils of life are innumerable. They cannot be purged away all at once. So, there is confusion in full tide and there is no help. They have long been tossed and toyed about, and now perhaps put aside and forgotten. They have lived so long in the heat and toil that their senses have grown numb, their souls have grown quite dull. And so, now they choose to remain here, in the land of beauty and of dreams, forever and beyond recall.

All this is hopeless philosophy–a philosophy of escapism, a negative philosophy of life. And yet, now and then, even the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the unprofitable stir, the fret of the world as appalling and craves in his dream of dreams for a world, far away from the hurry, worry and frequent flurry of the world. And the more the man is sensitive, the more the weight hangs heavy upon him. And so it was in case of Tennyson. He was “The” Victorian poet, or else he was coupled with Browning in this had eminence. And that age, in spite of its good qualities, had also had its daring sins; and Tennyson was fated to be the most formidable exponent of his age. The balance between science and religion was ever rapidly moving. Every belief was in a fluid state. And so, poor Tennyson could not be one man. He was to be many in one, because “he was one of the most sensitive points of his age.”

So it was not an age of belief; it was not an age of disbelief; it was an age of doubt and despair and timidity, which resulted in the dwindling of the artist’s personality. For confidence is ‘the alpha and omega’ of fine arts. The novelist of this age, however, reflects the pessimistic atheism of the times, while Hopkins shares the effect of his study of Duns Scotus. But Hopkins is an exception, who believed in the remote past and projected on to the distant future.

Coming to the modern times, we find that this problem of the relation between literature and belief has obsessed critics and creative artists. Mr. D. J. Enright observes: “In 1920 the first concern with such problems showed itself. First writer’s belief and his sincerity, between the man who believed something old and the mind which created something new. That is how the “modern poets” tried to dissociate themselves from the self-conscious moralis­ing of certain Victorians and from the romantic conception of the poets as an inspired bard delivering himself of divine truths, orthodox or otherwise. “There are a handful of poets who try to reassert the necessity of belief, by writing poems which affect “a complete severence between poetry and all beliefs.” This is a kind of negative capability that Mr. Eliot has, and in this age of publicity and propa­ganda, this method has its original points. But, there again it is art and not belief which attracts readers. And it is the very slow and imperceptible conversion of the reader that is remarkable. This was necessary in an age of complication and complexity. Fr. Martin Jarret Kerr says: “The loss of single religious tradition has meant that the metaphysical and religious implications of literature became more marked (in this age) than in the age when the metaphysic or religion could be taken for granted and so leave the writer to get on with his job.”

The modern man is never driven unless by necessity. That is what George Santayana seemed to believe. “If any similar adequacy (to Dante) is attained again by any poet, it will not be presumably, but a poet of the Supernatural. For when man’s attention is forcibly directed to competition between skepticism and belief, then the recovery, or in most cases even the retention of a belief, becomes a self-conscious operation.”

But the question is, how much of art can be created by self-­consciousness. It is true that we may not be able to overlook Dante’s theological beliefs while appreciating his great poetry, as much as we would not be able to overlook Keat’s poetic beliefs while analysing his poems, but will it be reasonable to bring along our own theological beliefs while appreciating a work of art. But Mr. T. S. Eliot candidly remarks that, “I cannot, in practice, wholly separate my poetic appreciation from my personal beliefs...” But Fr. Jarrett Kerr is pretty clear and concise in his views: “Actually one probably has more pleasure in the poetry when one shares the belief of the poet. On the other hand there is a distinct pleasure in enjoying poetry when one does not share the beliefs.” Trying to save Mr. Eliot to some extent, Mr. Enright says, Mr. Eliot cannot say the same things with conviction now; he has been occupied with “belief” not to the point of admiring bad writers simply because they express opinions with which he agrees but at least to the extent of tolerating bad writers, who throw dirt on opinions with which he does not agree. And possibly to the extent of doing injustice to writers whose views must inevitably strike him as heretical. He has come to regard Christian belief more important than literature.” Not Christian belief as such, but Christian belief was depicted by Roman Catholicism. But if appreciation of poetry is made dependent on individual beliefs, it would become sectarian and communal, and literature which has enjoyed a universality would be lost. The world of poetry starting from Omar Khayam to Whitman including Tagore and Goethe and Iqbal would be lost to divergent groups engaged in theological strife, if personal beliefs were to colour poetic appreciation.

Yet, much of modern criticism is based on the writer’s views rather than his poetic abilities. While Shelley was brought down by Mr. Eliot for his views, the Communists raised him up because of his republicanism. So that, poetry becomes the centre of politics. Dr. Leavis, the protagonist of a purist literary criticism, also describes himself as a moralist; and much of his adverse criticism of writers past and present includes an ethical judgment upon their response to life as a whole.

But coming to the point, how the dissociation of the writers and readers have occurred in the modern age due to the faith of the one and the faithlessness of the other, we are bound to consider the method of the former to convert the latter. Earlier I have regarded it as a unique method of publicity–“This complete severance of poetry and all beliefs”–acts as the Similia similibus curantur. But it had also its disadvantages. The new poets have imposed themselves by accident, mixed with cleverness, on a small and gullible public. The modern poem does appear cold and deliberate and self-conscious. For a long time the English public that reads poetry had been small; but it has lately become gullible. And the poets have been moving farther and farther from the ordinary readers. At the end of the war the gulf was widened by the theory and practice of Mr. T. S. Eliot. The poets no longer tried to be comprehensible, and the readers no longer expected to understand. Thus the public for English poetry became gullible. Mr. Enright points out this in his Apothecary’s Shop, “And today, among the new poets, this notion that poems can be skillfully constructed around an intellectual whimsy is still responsible for a good deal of clever meaninglessness.” Consequently, the reader now approaches the poem in a spirit of extraordinary meekness. He is prepared for anything, he will swallow anything; he will not complain, he will not ask questions. He is content to suppose that the queerer it sounds, the better it is. The public has been bamboozled into accepting his maunderings. This is an attitude which does seem to many as highly objectionable, arrogant, immature and uncivillised. The poets seemed to be really refusing from arrogance or melancholy or sloth to act in a civilized way. This is deplorable and unprecedented. Hitherto, when the reader did not understand, he blamed the poet. But this present attitude is worse; he admires or affects to admire what he does not understand. Under the circumstances, the belief of the poet hardly comes to light.

But as I have said before, this is the manner the poets have imposed upon themselves in order to work up the conversion. Now, one can only tell ones commodities not by saying that what it is, but by saying what it is not. In T. S. Eliot there is not a single reference to church or temple or anything religious, but to gardens and clubs and cheep toilets and yet invariably they ultimately lead youto the Church. Yet, in a manner you can not have time to find fault with the poet’s views–to criticise him in the usual manner of criticism, for you do not get a prescience as you got hitherto. This is the punishment of the age-old critics for annihilating Keats before his time. The wonderful achievement of modern poetry is the creation of the excitement among the unbelievers en masse in spite of its own belief. Then the readers exert themselves to find out the references–they go to the Bible, the Gita, the Upanishads to Bandol as well as to Dante.

This is rather a slow process of conversion, but it is nevertheless, a very sure process. Naturally in this period of transition the poets have allowed themselves to be estranged.