5.4. The Peacock / Shelley debate
5.4.1. Thomas Love Peacock
5.4.2. Percy Bysshe Shelley
5.4.1. Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)
Peacock and Shelley are the spokesmen for two opposed attitudes towards poetry; they were friends to each other, but their views on literature were radically opposed. Peacock spoke against poetry and Shelley defended poetry. Arguments of this kind appear again and again during the 19th century.
Peacock's arguments derive from those used since the late 17th by such people as Sprat, Fontenelle, Diderot; he is a sympathizer of Neoclassicism, and an upholder of the ideals of the 18th-century Illustration, which in the 19th century derives towards a reverence for science and an optimistic confidence in the power of mankind to get rid of superstition.
In England, these views are upheld most explicitly by Utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham or James Mill. Bentham declared that art was completely useless and superfluous, and had no place in a well organized society, where all effort should be directed to the happiness of the greatest number of people. He puts forward the Platonic argument that art is pernicious to society because it feeds the passions and prejudices. His insensitivity towards literature was absoluteæhe defined poetry as that kind of writing where the lines do not run till the end of the page. But these attitudes are not restricted to Utilitarians. Lord Macaulay, an important essayist and historian, declared that a certain "unsoundess of mind" was necessary for the cultivation of poetry, and Hazlitt observed that art regresses as civilization advances.
This idea is the starting point for Peacock's main critical work, a short essay entitled "The Four Ages of Poetry" (1820),
" the most sustained account of the conflict beween poetry and science as it stood in the age of the Romantic poets" (Wimsatt and Brooks 416). Peacock opposed romantic poetry. The decline of poetry is inevitably linked to the progress of mankind: poetry has now become obsolete. It belongs to a past age, it is not of the present. Peacock presents us with "a superficially cyclic account ofthe history of culture and poetry, and springing out of that a triumphantly unfair assault on contemporary English poetry" (Wimsatt and Brooks 416).
Peacock's theory of the four ages of poetry is modelled as a variation of the classical topos of the ages of the world: "Poetry, like the world, may be said to have four ages, but in a different order; the first age of poetry being the age of iron; the second, of gold; the third, of silver, and the fourth, of brass" (491). Along these four ages, we can witness the gradual withdrawal of poetry from the realm of fact first, and then of thought.
· The age of iron is a savage age of warriors and superstition, a savage age where poetry is the only kind of intellectual activity. Not that it is eminently refined: it is merely propaganda for the deeds of the savage chieftains.
· The golden age sees the rise of kingdoms, social institutions; it is more settled, and tends to reminisce the deeds of the iron age. It is an age which glories in its ancestors. The truly great poets, like Homer or Aeschylus, belong to this age; their poetry is rough, energetic and inclusive. Poetry is still the greatest intellectual achievement: science and philosophy have not been developed yet. But, Peacock observes, "with the progress of reason and civilization, facts become more interesting than fiction: indeed this maturity of poetry may be considered the infancy of history" (492). Moral and cognitive aims begin to prevail over mythology, and soon the sciences are born: it is the end of the golden age.
· The silver age is the age of civilized life. The Romans, the neoclassicals, are the perfect examples of a silver age. Poetry is less original than that of the golden age: it tends to take that poetry as its model, at least as far as serious genres are concerned. Virgil imitates Homer, and the originality of the silver age is restricted to the minor or comical genres. It is an age of refinement and selection; perfection is more appreciated than variety, and this often results in monotony. Poetry has limited its range, and tends towards the commonplace. History, morals, philosophy, all sciences attain a high development; their findings are too specialised to afford a subject for poetry; poetry ceases to be an instrument of knowledge, it cannot follow the development of these sciences. "Good sense and elegant learning, conveyed in polished and somewhat monotonous verse, are the perfection of the original and imitative poetry of civilized life . . . . It is now evident that poetry must either cease to be cultivated, or strike into a new path" (493).
· The age of brass wants to restore the original strength of purity by a deliberate return to primitivism. It wants to become the second childhood of poetry: it tries to revive the golden age and the intimacy with nature, but to no avail. It lacks energy, and instead of the great epics of the golden age, we have
a verbose and minutely detailed description of thoughts, passions, actions, persons and things, in that loose rambling style of verse, which anyone may write, stans pede in uno, at the rate of two hundred lines in an hour. (495).
Peacock's primary aim in writing his essay is a satirical one, and "the clichés of Romanticism do not escape him unscathed" (Adams 490). Peacock parodies the poetry of Wordsworth: he believes that Wordsworth's primitivistic ideals are a hoax and a perversion of the intellect; it is a false return to nature that Wordsworth effects. In fact, all modern poets are the same:
While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age . . . . A poet in our times is a semibarbarian in a civilized community. (496).
Vico and the German romantics had already established the relationship between the poet, the child and the savage, but in an entirely different spirit: the poet's function is to refreshen, to revitalize by opposing his creative feeling to the reason of the modern world. Not so for Peacock: the poet works through feeling and not reason, all right, but then Peacock does not regard this as a commendation. In his view, "the highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of facticious sentiment" (496). Peacock does not seem to fear the dehumanization of the modern world through reason. Poetry may be ornamental and even pleasurable, but it is in no way useful or beneficial. It only survives thanks to the favour of the mass of uneducated people, who yield to every easy sentiment. The really learned men do no longer care about poetry:
intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves on other and better channels, and have abandoned the cultivation and fate of poetry to the degenerate fry of modern rhymesters, and their Olympic judges, the magazine critics (497).
Peacock's faith in the benefits of progress and the new scientific spirit is little qualified. "The romantic theorist could, of course, retort that the poet's 'primitivism' provides a necessary opposition to rationalism run rampant" (Adams 490).
There is a certain contradiction in Peacock's idea of the four ages. On the one hand, he is confident that the age of poetry is well past; on the other he acknowledges that there have been two complete cycles, and that he is living (we are living) in the second brass age. There was one complete cycle starting with the Greeks and ending with the late Roman empire, and another one starting with the Middle Ages and ending now. But Peacock does not seem to believe that a new age of iron is imminent. That is, he seems to be supporting both a linear and a cyclical conception of history. This ambigous attitude towards history is also to be found in Dryden and later neoclassicals.
Peacock's essay also represent the immediate link between the Classical doctrine of the four ages of mankind (golden, silver, iron, and bronze), the Viconian ideas about myth and metaphor and the positivist doctrine, soon to be advanced by Comte, of the three ages of mankind (theological, metaphysical, scientific). Like Comte, Peacock rejoices in the disappearance of the mists of the past and the oncoming of a rational future for mankind. The most curious thing about it all is that Peacock was a novelist and poet himself; but then his attitude as a writer is constantly ironic, cynical and contradictory.
5.4.2. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Shelley is the most accomplished instance of the second generation of Romantic poets, leading a scandalous life and adhering to any suspicious doctrine he found, from atheism to political revolution or vegetarianism. He wrote A Defense of Poetry (1821)
on the model of Sidney's Apology (also called The Defence of Poesy ), as an answer to Peacock and to all the scientist movement which disparaged poetry. Poetry reveals the order and beauty of the universe. "Shelley's Defense of Poetry makes perhaps greater claims for the poet than anyone had ever dared" (Adams 490). In this work, "strains of 18th-century primitivism mingle throughout with a Germanically-colored romantic excitement about the immediately spiritual and morally plastic power of the poet" (Wimsatt and Brooks 419).
"Beginning with the familiar Romantic distinction between imagination (synthesis) and reason (analysis), Shelley proceeds to attribute to the products of imagination immense spiritual and cultural powers" (Adams 490). To start with, reason is merely contemplative, while imagination is creative: "Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance" (499). Poetry he defines as "the expression of the imagination" (490); it was born when man was born. Man has in him this creative principle, or rather, this ability to tune up with the universe, but it is present in the poet in a greater degree (cf. Coleridge, Sidney). The poet is "more delicately organized than other men" (512; cf. Coleridge, Richards). Poetry is not a question of the will, but of inspiration. Shelley believes in inspiration: the poet's activity is the manifestation of some hidden cosmic creative force. He uses Plato's image of the magnetised rings and Coleridge's image of the aeolian harp to express this. Indeed, the real poetry is not that which we can find in the poem; it is rather the very experience or inspired trance of the poet: "when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet" (511). So, Shelley's definition of poetry is not formalist or textual; it is based on the experience of the poet, not on characteristics of the text or the experience of the reader: "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."
Poetry immortalizes the best of man. "Poetry redeems from decay the visitation of the divinity in man" (512).
It is to be noted that the poet experiences his vision in some degree, but he is also instrumental to it: poetry goes far beyond the poet, as we can gather from the enthusiastic eulogy of the poet which concludes the Defense , and which is in the best "divine madman" tradition :
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which ring to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. (513)
So, the poet is something like the unconscious voice of nature; a poetical formulation of this doctrine can be found in Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, which is a kind of "romantic Ars poetica " (Wimsatt and Brooks).
The poet also sows the seeds of social revolution. In ancient times he was a legislator and a prophet; and even now, the poet sees the future in the present and understands the the spirit of events, sees more profoundly than his contemporaries. At times, Shelley seems to believe seriously that all original thought has to be expressed in metre; and for him, Shakespeare or Milton are among the greatest of philosophers. A poet delights, instructs and moves: but this he does not do in a purposive way. Poetry is not a kind of discourse directed towards the public; rather, the poet sings in solitude, and is overheard by other men (cf. Mill). And poetry is not, as Peacock (and Plato) seems to suppose, identical in end with history or science, only more imperfect. The real value of a poem is not in the portrayal of particular things, but in the poetical quality which idealizes them. This poetical quality may appear in the whole poem, in a part, or even in a word. And the external form used to convey this quality may be rude, barbarous or immoral: but this does not affect the nature of the poetry. Poetry has a quality of its own: it is not a mirror of reality, like history; rather, it is a beautifying mirror: through poetry, we see the infinite in the finite. "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the one; as far as relates to his conception, time and place and number are not" (500). Poetry does not teach in the same way as science: "poetry acts in another and diviner way. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thoughts." The poet provides men with the creative faculty to imagine that which they already know conceptually (cf. Sidney's "moving").
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold ; by one it creates new materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. (510).
The creative activity of the poet is manifested in his work on language. The poet is the maker of language: "he helps remake the world by reconstructing the form through which we see it." The life of language springs from the perception of relationships between things , from metaphor. Shelley combines remarkably Vico's and Sidney's views when he says that "in the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry" (500). But metaphors die after a certain time, the relationship ceases to be perceived and language becomes disorganized, "and then , if no poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse" (500). Poetry makes us perceive the world anew by making us feel what we perceive; it removes "the film of familiarity from experience; "It recreates the universe, after it has been annihilated in out minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration."
Shelley offers a number of other definitions of poetry and poetic creation that are vague and Romantically all-inclusive . . . . Almost anyone who expresses a profound thought is classifiable as a poet under one or another of his definitions . It would seem that poetry is an activity of which a poem is but one of many possible products. (Adams 490)
He is not sure whether he wants to give to all artists the name of poets, or to claim that poets invented all the other arts; this is plausible, he says, because language, the material of poetry, is nearer to us than the materials of other arts; language is a kind of arbitrary outpouring of human imagination. Indeed, he sees poetry as the source of all invention, a kind of all-inclusive knowledge, the closest human analogue to real creation. Here we find the essential difference between Shelley's defense and that of Sidney:
Sidney in all his talking about the teaching and persuading power of poetry would never dream that poetry was teaching or persuading any doctrine which it did not discover in some legislative competent authority outside itself, either Scriptural revelation or ethical philosophy. With Shelley just the opposite is true. (Wimsatt and Brooks 422-423)
Admittedly, he pushes this argument too far. Shelley is at his best on his remarks on poetry as a language-creating activity which makes us see the world anew. Shelley's Defense is remarkable by its enthusiastic synthesis of many Romantic positions; on the whole it is both extreme and not radically original, but its faith and its imagery make it a forceful statement of the Romantic view of poetry.