Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic | Page 6

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 fernowl,

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