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PLATFORM
MONOLOGUES
By
T. G. TUCKER
LITT.D. (CAMB.); HON. LITT.D. (DUBLIN)
Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Melbourne
MELBOURNE
THOMAS C. LOTHIAN
1914
_PRINTED IN ENGLAND_
Copyright.
First Edition May, 1914.
PREFACE
The following monologues were given as public addresses, mostly to
semi-academical audiences, and no alteration has been made in their
form. Their common object has been to plead the cause of literary study
at a time when that study is being depreciated and discouraged. But
along with the general plea must go some indication that literature can
be studied as well as read. Hence some of the articles attempt--what
must always be a difficult task--the crystallizing of the salient
principles of literary judgment.
The present collection has been made because the publisher believes that
a sufficiently large number of intelligent persons will be interested in
reading it. On the whole that appears to be at least as good a reason as
any other for printing a book.
The addresses on "The Supreme Literary Gift," "The Making of a
Shakespeare," and "Literature and Life," have appeared previously as
separate brochures. Those on "Two Successors of Tennyson" and "Hebraism
and Hellenism" were printed in the Melbourne _Argus_ at the time of
their delivery, and are here reproduced by kind permission of that
paper. The talk upon "The Future of Poetry" has not hitherto appeared in
print.
Though circumstances have prevented any development of the powers and
work of the two "Successors of Tennyson," there is nothing either in the
criticism of those writers or in the principles applied thereto which
seems to call for any modification at this date. For the rest, it is
hoped that the lecture will be read in the light of the facts as they
were at the time of its delivery.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 5
THE SUPREME LITERARY GIFT 9
HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM 53
THE PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM, APPLIED
TO TWO SUCCESSORS OF TENNYSON 95
THE MAKING OF A SHAKESPEARE 147
LITERATURE AND LIFE 191
THE FUTURE OF POETRY 219
The Supreme Literary Gift
When we have been reading some transcendent passage in one of the
world's masterpieces we experience that mental sensation which Longinus
declares to be the test of true sublimity, to wit, our mind "undergoes a
kind of proud elation and delight, as if it had itself begotten the
thing we read." We are disposed by such literature very much as we are
disposed by the Sistine Madonna or before the Aphrodite of Melos. Things
like these exert a sort of overmastering power upon us. Our craving for
perfection, for ideal beauty, is for once wholly gratified. Our spirit
glows with an intense and complete satisfaction. It would build itself a
tabernacle on the spot, for it recognizes that it is good to be there.
We do not analyse, we do not criticize, we simply deliver over our souls
to a proud elation and delight. Nay, at the moment when we are in the
midst of such spontaneous and exquisite enjoyment, we should, in all
likelihood, resent any attempt to make us realize exactly _why_ this
particular creation of art so fills up our souls down to the last cranny
of satisfaction while another stops short of that supreme effect.
And yet, afterwards, when we are meditating upon this strange potency of
a poem or a building or a statue, or when we are trying to communicate
to others the feeling of its charm, do we not find ourselves
importunately asking wherein lies the secret of great art? And, in the
case of literature, we think it at such times no desecration of our
delight to put a passage of Shakespeare or of Milton beside a passage of
Homer, of AEschylus, or of Dante, an essay of Lamb beside a chapter of
Heine, a lyric of Burns by one of Shelley, and to seek for some common
measure of their excellence.
Suppose that, in these more reflective moments, we can come near to some
explanation; suppose we can realize what it is that these supreme
writers alone achieve; then, when we read again, the very perfection of
their achievement springs forward and comes home to us with a still
keener delight. We feel all we felt before, but we enjoy it more,
because we understand in some degree why we feel it. Say what we will,
we are never really content with an admiration which cannot render to
itself a reason. What are all the thousand works of literary criticism
called forth by, unless it be by that perpetual question which nags for
an answer in all intelligent minds, the question "What is the gift
which, behind all mere diction, behind all cadence and rhythm and rhyme,
behind all mere lucidity, behind all mere intellect, and behind all
variety of subject matter, makes writing everlastingly fresh, admirable,
a thing of beauty and a joy for ever"?
Alas! we cannot, indeed, necessarily hope to get that gift into our own
power because we can perceive it in the great masters. According to the
Apostle, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and
cometh down from the Father of lights." "Their vigour is of the fire and
their origin is celestial," says the pagan. The _coelestis origo_ is
unpurchasable. Nevertheless, even for the ordinary being who aspires
himself to write, there is this practical benefit to be derived from an
insight into the truth--that he will know in what the supreme gift does
consist. He will not delude himself into fancying that it means merely
grammatical accuracy, or a command of words, or tricks of phrase, or a
faculty for rhyming, or logical precision, or any of those other
commonplace qualities and dexterities which are almost universally
attainable.
He will at least aim at the right thing, and, even if he fails, his work
will be all the higher for that aim.
* * * * *
I do not propose to speak in general of great books, but only of great
literature. Literature proper is not simply writing. You may tell in
writing the most important and unimpeachable truths concerning science
and history, concerning nature and man, without being in the least
literary. You may argue and teach and describe in books which are of
immense vogue and repute, without pretending to be a figure in
literature. But, on the other hand, you may be very wrong; logically,
scientifically, historically, ethically altogether wrong; and yet you
may exercise an irresistible literary fascination over your own
generation and all that follow. Charles Lamb speaks disdainfully of
books which are no books, things in books' clothing. He had in mind Adam
Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, essays on population, treatises on moral
philosophy, and so forth. He meant that such works are works, but no
literature. Mill's _Logic_, geographical descriptions, guidebooks, the
_Origin of Species_, whatever may be the value of such volumes for
thought or knowledge, they are not literature. There is only one test to
apply to such books as those. If their statements are true, if their
reasoning is accurate, if their exposition is clear, such works are good
of their kind. Nevertheless, it is scarcely literary judgment which
judges them. You might as well apply "architectural" criticism to our
rows of tin-roofed cottages or to the average warehouse or wool-store or
tramshed. These are buildings, but they are not architecture.
Meanwhile Herodotus, with all his superstitions, his credulity and
mistakes; Plato, with all his blunders in elementary logic; Homer,
with all his naive ignorance of science and the wide world; Dante,
despite his cramped outlook; Milton, in spite of his perverse
theologizing--these and their like are, and will always be, literature.
No matter if Carlyle's _French Revolution_ be in reality as far from
the literal truth as the work of Froude, yet Carlyle and Froude are
literature, along with Herodotus and Livy and Froissart, while the most
scrupulously exact of chronicles may be but books.
The charm of supreme literature is independent of its date or country.
The current literary taste varies, we know, at different periods and in
different places. There are successive fashions and schools of
literature and literary principle--an Attic, an Alexandrian, an
Augustan, a Renaissance Italian, an Elizabethan, a Louis Quatorze, a
Queen Anne, a nineteenth century Romantic. And yet from each and all of
these there will stand out one or two writers, sometimes more, whom we
have enthroned in the literary Pantheon, and whose place there among the
gods seems only to grow the more assured as time goes on.
Now, what is it that is left, the common _residuum_, to all these
literary masters; to Homer, Sappho, AEschylus, Plato, Theocritus,
Juvenal; to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere; to Goethe, Shelley,
Victor Hugo, Carlyle, in spite of all their manifest differences in
subject, and style, in ideas and ideals, in range of thought and
knowledge? When we have got behind all the varying and often
contradictory criticism of their several epochs; when we have stripped
away the characteristics which mark a special era; what is there
essentially and everlastingly good--in the true sense "classic"--in
virtue of which these particular writers renew for themselves with every
generation the suffrages of understanding humanity? If there is a
"survival of the fittest" anywhere, it is assuredly in art, and
especially in the art of literature. Seeing then that writer is so
unlike to writer, both in what he says and the way in which he says it,
what is that cardinal literary virtue, that quintessential _x_, in
virtue of which both alike are masters in their craft?
The answer is very elusive. Let us seek it, in the Socratic spirit,
together.
* * * * *
But first let me remind you that in order to find the answer, the seeker
must possess both literary cultivation and also breadth of mind. Unless
we have read widely in literature of many sorts and kinds; unless we
have developed a generous catholicity of taste and appreciation, a
many-sidedness of sympathy and interest; unless we have corrected our
natural idiosyncrasies by what Matthew Arnold, after Goethe, calls a
"harmonious expansion of all our powers," we cannot see clearly; we
cannot distinguish between the impressions which we derive from literary
power and art, and the impressions which we derive from something else
to which we happen to be partial, but which is quite irrelevant to the
question. Any one who belongs to a particular "school," whether of style
or thought; any one who approaches literature with a spirit overweighted
by political bias, scientific bias, or religious bias, is disqualified.
He cannot hope to stand equally away from, or equally near to, Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, and, after setting aside their elements
of disagreement, distinguish and admire that which is definitely and for
ever admirable in their creations. Do we lack sympathy with the tragic
feeling? Do we shrink from it? Then we can be no judges of tragic art,
of _King Lear_ or the _OEdipus_. Have we no sense of humour, or only a
gross and vulgar sense of humour? Then we can be no judges of the
writings of Cervantes or of Sterne. Are we incapable of ardent idealism?
Then we cannot be just to Shelley. Is a capacity for profound reverence
and adoration not ours? Then we must not claim to say the last word on
Dante. The uncongenial subject prevents us from feeling with the writer,
and we therefore fancy a defect of literary power or charm in him, while
the defect is all the time in ourselves. We will, for the moment,
suppose ourselves to be the ideal critics. And let us first see what the
supreme literary gift is _not_.
* * * * *
We may admit that, in all literature which the world will not willingly
let die, there must be expressed something worth expressing. The matter
must be, in some way, of interest. But it appears to signify little
_how_ it interests. It may be enlightening, elevating, or inspiriting:
it may be profoundly touching: it may be of a fine or gracious sentiment
or fancy: it may be startling: it may be simply entertaining. Some
people, perhaps, remembering certain French and other fiction, would say
that it may even be deliberately wicked. That I do not believe. On the
contrary, it is much to the credit of a world which is declared to be so
rotten with original sin, that deliberately wicked writing finds so
little lasting favour with it. It does gladly let such writing die,
however well written. Interest fails, and admiration of the literary
skill is speedily swallowed up in disgust. Moreover it is seldom that
the true possessor of the supreme literary gift turns it to base ends.
Consummate literature, we have admitted, must be interesting. It would
be truer to say that the possessor of the supreme literary gift will
_make_ his matter interest us, however light or serious, however literal
or imaginative, it may be. But, when once of interest, the matter may be
anything you will.
The supreme literary gift, for example, does not imply profundity or
originality of thought. Homer and Chaucer are not deep thinkers, nor is
Herodotus or Virgil, Burns, Keats, or Tennyson. There need be nothing
philosophically epoch-making about a literary creation which is destined
to be immortal. Nor yet does the supreme literary gift necessarily imply
extraordinary depth of emotion. Of the writers just named Burns and
Keats perhaps have this capacity, but the rest--including
Tennyson--reveal little of it. We do not find burning passion to be a
distinct feature in Plato, in Milton, in Goethe, or in Matthew Arnold,
while it is emphatic in Sappho, in Byron, and in Shelley. Again, the
supreme literary gift does not imply any special expression of truth or
instruction, moral, religious or other. Homer and Dante cannot both be
right. If Homer is right, then Dante is lamentably wrong; and if Dante
is right, Goethe is unforgivably wrong. Wordsworth cannot be harmonized
with Shelley. Milton was a Puritan, Keats a neo-pagan. In the domain of
literal and historical truth what becomes of _Gulliver's Travels_, or
Scott's novels, or, for the matter of that, _Paradise Lost_?
All this is self-evident. Yet, if we do not ask our superlative writers
to be heaven-sent teachers, to be prophets, to be discoverers, what do
we ask of them? Is it to write in a particular style, in a given lucid
style, a given figurative style, or a given dignified style? Nay, it is
only very mediocre writers who could obey such precepts. Every supreme
writer has his own style, inalienable and inimitable, which is as much a
part of him as his own soul, the look in his eyes, or his tones of
voice. Bethink yourselves of Carlyle, how his abrupt, crabbed, but
withal sinewy and picturesque, prose compares with the pure crystalline
sentences of Cardinal Newman, and how these again compare with the
quaintly and pathetically humorous chat, the idealized talk of Charles
Lamb. Think how easy it is to recognize a line of Shakespeare, of
Milton, or of Wordsworth, almost by the ear; how audibly they are
stamped with the character of their creator. There are, in fact, exactly
as many styles as there are superlative writers. Indeed this
individuality of style is the outward and visible sign of their inward
and spiritual literary gift, which is the gift to express--_oneself_.
* * * * *
Then what does the superlative writer do? The fact is that literature in
the proper sense is an art, as much an art as painting or sculpture or
music. The supreme masters in literature are artists, and the consensus
of the world, though unconsciously, comes to judge them simply as
such--not as thinkers or teachers, sages or prophets. They are artists.
And what is the province of art? After all the definitions and
discussions are exhausted, we are, I believe, brought down to one solid
answer, the answer of Goethe, "art is only the giving of shape and
form." That is to say, the object of art, whether in words or colours or
shapes or sounds, is simply to give expression to a conception, to a
thought, a feeling, an imagined picture which exists in the mind of the
artist. His aim is to communicate it truly, wholly, perfectly to the
minds of his fellow men, by one of the only two possible channels. By
means of art mind can communicate itself to mind either through the eyes
or through the ears; by spoken words and music through the ears, by
painting and sculpture and written words through the eyes.
I need not dwell upon the thought what a wonderful thing this
communication is, whereby the pictures and feelings existing in one
brain are flashed upon another brain. Nor need I elaborate the point
that this communication is rarely absolute, rarely even adequate. To
make people understand, even those who know us best, how difficult that
is!
The Greek sculptor Praxiteles conceives a human form of perfect beauty,
posed in an attitude of perfect grace, wearing an expression of perfect
charm and serenity. It exists but as a picture in his brain; but he
takes marble and hews it and chisels it till there stands visible and
unmistakable before us his very conception. He has given body and form
to his imagination. Perfect artist as he is, he communicates with
absolute exactness his mental picture to all the world of them who
behold his work.
The Italian painter Raphael conceives a woman of infinite loveliness and
purity and tenderness to represent the mother of Christ. How are we to
be sharers in that conception? He takes brushes and paint, and there
grows upon his canvas the Sistine Madonna, that picture of such mystic
potency, which to see at Dresden is never to forget. He stamps upon our
minds the very image and the very feeling which were upon his own.
The great musician hears imaginary sounds and harmonies within his
brain, proceeding from or accompanying emotions of divers kinds. He
forthwith, by arrangements and combinations of musical notes, their
times and qualities, communicates to us also those sounds and harmonies;
he reproduces in us those same emotions.
Do not say that it is the function of an artist to communicate to us
beautiful things or ugly things, things graceful or things profound,
things of pleasure or things of grief. Say rather, simply, it is his
function, as artist, to communicate--perfectly, absolutely--whatsoever
he seeks to communicate, in its form, with its feeling, in its mood;
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of his conception
and its atmosphere. No doubt the thing of beauty, the profound thing,
the thing of joy, is most delightful for the spectator to contemplate;
to the artist himself it is apt to be most inspiring, and therefore art
seems to be concerned mainly with beauty and joy. But that is the only
reason. As artist, his function is simply to body forth, and present to
other minds, whatever he conceives, and he is consummate artist just in
proportion as he secures that end.
Now take the literary artist. He in his turn conceives a thought, or
picture of the imagination or fancy. A feeling may come over him with a
gentle grace, a subtle influence, an overmastering passion. A mood--a
state of soul--may colour all his view, tinging it with some haunting
melancholy or irradiating his whole world till it seems a Paradise. How
is he to communicate to us this thought, this picture, this fancy, the
grace and subtlety and passion, the precise hues of his mood for
sombreness or radiancy? Well, he takes words, and by selecting them, by
combining them, by harmonizing them with a master's hand, he sets
before us certain magic phrases wrought into a song, an ode, an elegy,
or whatsoever form of creation is most apt and true, and he makes us see
just what he sees and feel just what he feels, printing it all upon our
own brains and hearts.
In this then must lie the essence of the literary gift--in the power of
a writer to express himself, to communicate vividly, without mistiness
of contents or outline, his own spirit and vision. I repeat that it is
irrelevant whether what he sees and feels be beautiful or not, joyful or
not, profound or not, even true or not. Nor does it matter either what
his style may be. He is a master in the art of writing when he can make
his own mind, so to speak, entirely visible or audible to us, when he
can express what his inward eye beholds in such terms that we can behold
it in the same shape and in the same light--if, for example, when he
sees a thing in "the light which never was on sea or land, the
consecration and the poet's dream," he can make us also see it in that
faery light.
This is no such easy thing. The fact that there are a hundred thousand
words in the English dictionary does not make it easier. It is not
those who know the most words that can necessarily best express
themselves. Neither is it true that, because feeling is real, it can
therefore speak. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh"
has no such sense as that. Many and many a fine thought is lost to the
world, and all the value of many a deep emotion, because he who thinks
or feels cannot voice himself, any more than you or I can necessarily
take a brush and paint, like Turner, the unspeakable glories of a sunset
which our eyes and soul can nevertheless appreciate to the very full.
"What makes a poet?" says Goethe, and he replies, "A heart brimful of
some noble passion." No doubt the noble passion must be there _before_ a
man can be a poet, but equally beyond doubt the passion alone cannot
make him one. To say that a heart full of the ardour of religion, of
love, of hope, of sorrow or joy, can always express its ardour, is an
assertion against which thousands of poor inarticulate human beings
would rise in protest. It is simply contrary to experience. There is
many a man and woman besides Wordsworth to whom "the meanest flower that
blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"; but,
unlike Wordsworth, no sooner do these less gifted men and women attempt
to express one such thought and impart it to others, than lo! the subtle
thought evades them and is gone. They can give it no embodiment in
language. Their attempt ends in words which they know to be obscure,
cold, trivial, hopelessly ineffectual.
* * * * *
How unevenly distributed is this power of expression! Let us begin as
low in the scale of verbal art as you choose. Let two observers chance
to see some previously unknown plant, with novel leaf and flower and
perfume. If they could paint the leaf and flower, well and good; but ask
each separately to communicate to you in words a mental picture of that
plant. Observe how, with equal education in the matter of language, the
one will describe you the forms and colours and fragrance in apt and
expressive terms and comparisons, which seem to paint it before your
eyes. The other plods and halts and fails, and leaves no clear
impression. If to the one the flower is just red and pointed, to the
other it is, perhaps, a tongue of flame. The one has but literal facts
to tell, the other is full of imagination and similitude.
Take a step higher. Have you seen and heard the lark, and studied his
movements and his song aloft in the sky of Europe? Can you express
simply what you then saw and heard, so that all who have witnessed the
same can see and feel it over again? How many words would you take, and
how vivid might your picture be? Then compare your effort with Shelley's
famous
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun!
Another step, and we come to a region no longer of outward description,
but of thought, of feeling, of delicate fancy, of soaring imagination.
I suppose thousands upon thousands of persons possessed of what our
great-grandfathers used to call "sensibility," have felt at eventide,
when alone in certain spots, a kind of subduing awe, as if some great
spirit-existence pervading all nature were laying a solemn hush upon
the world. In various degrees one here and one there can express that
feeling, but how many can express it as simply and yet effectually as
Wordsworth does:--
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder--everlastingly!
* * * * *
To express and body forth: there is room for the manifestation of this
prime literary gift in all sort of subjects. It may be shown in a fable
of AEsop, in _Robinson Crusoe_, in a children's story, in Mark Twain's
boyish experiences on the Mississippi, in a Barrack-room Ballad of
Rudyard Kipling, in Thackeray's _Esmond_, in Shelley's _Ode to a
Skylark_, in either a comedy of Shakespeare or his _Hamlet_, in a sonnet
of Dante's _Vita Nuova_ or in his _Inferno_. AEsop's communication of his
point of view is final. So is Defoe's communication of mental pictures.
So is Mark Twain's of that Mississippi pilotage. So is Kipling's in his
_Drums of the Fore and Aft_, or his _Mandalay_. These men are all
admirable literary artists in their own domains. Each fulfils all that
is demanded of his art. If we could keep this fact clearly before us,
our judgments of writers might be more discriminating. Do we think
Kipling possessed of an extraordinary degree of the literary gift? Who
could think otherwise, seeing that he can effect exactly what he sets
out to effect by means of words? His scenes and his thoughts--such as
they are--start forth living before us. But do we then think a Kipling
proved equal to a Shakespeare in sheer excellence of his gift? That is
another question. The things which Shakespeare realizes and expresses
demand powers of realization and expression more far-reaching and more
subtle than are required by those things to which a Kipling gives shape
and form. In Shakespeare are multitudes of deep and rare reflections,
vivid imaginings, penetrations of sympathy and insight, and all so
clearly crystallized, with such apparent ease, that they become ours at
once, as if they were natural to us. His communication of the most
subtle states of mind is complete. But in a Kipling we cannot pretend
that there is infinite subtlety and elusiveness, that there is a cosmic
condensing of a whole nebula of spiritual experience. His task was less
hard.
And what then of Homer? Can we call _his_ task a difficult one? Is he,
too, full of infinitely delicate or far-reaching thoughts and feelings?
No. But his aim is to reproduce all the freshness and breeziness of a
fresh and breezy atmosphere, to make us live again amid all that
simple wholesome strenuousness of the childhood of the western world.
That, too, is exceedingly elusive, and almost impossible to
catch--immeasurably more difficult than all those coarsely, if
strenuously, marked characteristics of the British soldier and other
bold figures on the canvas of Kipling.
That, I believe, is the right attitude to assume, when we endeavour to
measure the literary power of one writer against that of another--if we
must do such a thing at all. It is not the morality or non-morality, the
importance or non-importance, the beauty or ugliness, inherent in what
is said, which determine the degree of the literary gift. It is rather
the relative elusiveness of the thing said, the difficulty of
surrounding it, of condensing it, of giving it perfect body, and
communicating it in that body. And that is why it is an error to put,
let us say Gray, in the foremost rank of literary artists. How well he
does this thing! But was it, after all, so transcendently difficult to
do?
The vaguer, the deeper, the more comprehensive, the subtler the thought
or feeling or fancy, the greater demand is there upon the literary
power. One can say no more. It is as in sculpture, which finds it
infinitely easier to give embodiment to straining muscles and an
agonized face than to carve a statue in perfect restful beauty and with
a countenance of benign and strong tranquillity.
Ask a hundred people to write about the spring--simply to describe it
with its sights and sounds and odours--and most of them can perform the
task more or less well. Ask them to bring home the physical and
emotional influence of spring, and many of those who feel that influence
most keenly will give up the task. And then comes Chaucer with his few
touches, his "blissful briddes" and "fressche flowres," and tells us how
"full is my heart of revel and solace," and behold! the passage breathes
to the reader's heart the very spirit of youth and springtide.
A simple statement of a simple fact calls for no "literary" gift. A
description of externals demands some, but not often a great, degree of
it. A thought or feeling, which is suggested by the fact or object, may
require either little or much in proportion as the thought or feeling is
fine and fugitive. But a _mood_ induced by the thought or feeling
generally demands the gift in its highest degree. "A primrose by the
river's brim," whether "a yellow primrose 'tis to him," or a
dicotyledon, may be outwardly described more and less well; but we
require for that purpose only the rudiments of literary prose. But,
next, there is the pure and appealing beauty of the flower; and that
evokes gathering recognitions of the beauty of nature and its grace to
us. Then upon this there steals a feeling of exhilaration in the glad
and gay atmosphere of the re-awakening world; and this, again, may open
into a whole vista of recollections far back from childhood; and so the
result may be one of many moods. We have all this time been brought up a
sort of gradient of literary difficulty; and he is the supreme of
supreme literary artists who can body forth the most subtle of all these
thoughts and moods.
Let me illustrate. Take for the purpose of contrast this passage of
purely external description from Cowper:--
Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcerned
The cheerful haunts of man, to wield the axe
And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear,
From morn to eve his solitary task.
Shaggy and lean and shrewd, with pointed ears
And tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur,
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow, and now with many a frisk,
Wide-scampering, snatches up the drifted snow
With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout:
Then shakes his powdered coat and barks for joy--
and so forth. There you have clear and faithful observation, clearly and
faithfully reproduced. I do not want to depreciate the amount of
literary skill necessary for putting those right words in their right
places. Nevertheless I cannot bring myself to think it particularly
remarkable. The picture is distinct, but it is of the eye alone; it
involves nothing in the way of imagination, nothing in the way of subtle
feeling blending with the sight in the brain of the writer. Next take a
stanza from Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_:--
So, some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,
Before the roses and the longest day--
When garden walks and all the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And chestnut flowers are strewn--
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
"_The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I._"
Now to me that passage expresses something immeasurably more difficult
of expression. The whole tone of the environment is reproduced in a few
touches. We not only realize the scene, but we also feel in its
description the same mood of subtle pensiveness, with its flavour of
melancholy, in which the writer saw and felt it. For myself I know that
the passage brings back to me, exactly and perfectly, not only a mental
picture, but also a frame of mind, which I can recognize across the
years which now separate me from those English "garden walks and all the
grassy floor" strewn with "blossoms red and white of fallen May and
chestnut flowers."
If you have never experienced precisely that frame of mind, you cannot,
of course, appreciate the literary power, any more than you can
appreciate Shelley's all-exquisite
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments--
unless you have pondered the mystery of life and eternity somewhat as he
had done.
Yes! that must be premised all through. You must have had your own mood
of profound world-weariness, before you can appreciate the utter
completeness of the cry of Beatrice Cenci:--
"Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world,
The wide, gray, lampless, deep unpeopled world!"
The highest attainment then of literary power is the "exquisite
expression of exquisite--that is to say, rarely intense or
subtle--impressions." The language, said Wordsworth, should be the
"incarnation of the thought." The highest gift of the writer is to make
his words and their combinations not clever, not dazzling, not merely
lucid, but to make them, by their meanings, their associations, and
their musical effects, exactly reproduce what he thinks and sees and
feels, just in the special light in which he thinks and sees and feels
it.
This involves, of course, a perpetual struggle between thought and
language. Language is for ever striving to overtake thought and feeling.
Browning indeed may say:--
Perceptions whole, like that he sought
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language.
But in this we must not acquiesce. Browning himself, indeed, however
immense his range of sympathies, however extraordinary his dramatic
insight, falls far short in the purely literary gift. He is not a master
of language as Shakespeare was or as Tennyson was. Extremist votaries of
Browning are accustomed to say either that he is not obscure at all, or
else that his obscurities are inseparable from the thoughts. We must not
admit this latter plea until we are prepared to call Isaiah and
Shakespeare shallower than Browning.
The transcendent literary artist is always compelling language to
express what it had seemed incapable of expressing. Indeed the "advance
of literature" often means no more than a greater degree of success in
giving recognizable shape to the hitherto vague and elusive, in
communicating what was supposed to be incommunicable. Often, when we
say that such and such a writer gives us "new glimpses," or "opens up
new thoughts," it only means that he has discovered how to express such
thoughts, so that we can realize and recognize them. He is not an
inventor, but a revealer.
And the highest revealer is the great poet. Poetry is language and
music. Musicians tell us that music is intended to impart what language
cannot express--something unspeakably more delicate, more subtle,
emotionally more powerfully or more tranquillizing. But music must not
aim at too much. It cannot really describe action or define thoughts; it
can only translate feelings and moods into sounds. Now just as music is
always advancing, always endeavouring to fulfil more perfectly the
functions of art--which are, as I have said, to communicate the spirit
of one human being to his fellows--so language also is ever struggling
to enlarge its powers and to do what musicians tell us music alone can
do. Language, too, must translate feeling, and moods, but into words. It
in a sense invades the region of music. And herein lies the
justification--the necessity--for poetry, or for a prose which is
virtually poetry in its language and movement and imagination. Poetry,
in that broad sense, must always be the literary form for the expression
of that which is most difficult to express, I mean of anything which is
pervaded by a rare exaltation and passion of feeling, or by a delicate
grace and charm.
* * * * *
Some people pretend to think that poetry is a wholly artificial thing;
that it is merely a pleasing trick, when it is not an irritating trick,
with language. Well, alas! it is quite natural that many stern spirits
should be irritated by verses; for it is entirely true that nine-tenths
of what is being, or has been, written in verse might better have been
written in prose, or rather not written at all. The young author, and,
for the matter of that, the old author, who thinks that he has a perfect
right to choose between the verse form and the prose form simply
according as he can versify or not, is grievously in the wrong. There is
no more justification for, say, a purely didactic poem or descriptive
poem than there is for the rhyming which begins somebody's treatise on
optics with these egregious words:--
When parallel rays
Come opposite ways
And fall upon opposite sides.
Everything depends upon the nature of that which a man has to say.
What are the external marks of poetry as distinct from real prose?
These: the choice of words of a special emotional or pictorial force,
combined with musical cadences, rhythm, and sometimes rhyme. And why are
these employed? To tickle the ear? By no means. It is simply because
they are most effective agents in that communication of his mood and
spirit which is the aim of the artist. When a mere fact has to be
stated, there is no defence for verse, unless as an aid to memory, just
as we say--
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November.
When a thing can be said just as well in prose, there is no excuse for
not putting it in prose. That axiom should kill off half our amateur
poets and rid the world of a nuisance. On the other hand, when a thought
or a feeling is to be communicated from a mind profoundly stirred,
exalted, filled with fervour, or from a mind tingling with exquisite
perceptions, then there can be no true and full communication to
another mind, unless that mind also is stirred, exalted or made to
tingle. Music can so dispose that other mind. So too can language; for,
under the influence of poetry of perfect sound, we find stealing over
us, thanks largely _to_ the sound, a mood which could never result from
prose; and so our minds are polarized to feel the actual thing expressed
exactly as the writer feels it, to see it exactly as he sees it.
Verse-poetry, therefore, is no idle invention. It has its sound
philosophical basis; and where poetry is really demanded by the subject,
it is part and parcel of the supreme literary gift to wed the music of
the verse so aptly to the thought, that the communication from soul to
soul is utterly complete.
Is verse a mere conviction? Let us see. Does any one pretend that his
spirit would be just as much moved by the mere sense of this passage of
Tennyson, if it were stripped of its verse form and turned into prose:--
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
and--
Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
If he does, let us not envy him his powers of perception or sensation.
Would you feel for Coleridge just the same mood of sympathy, if he told
you his sad case in prose, as when he writes:--
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word or sigh or tear.
Listen once more to this:--
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers--
And _that_ cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west--
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!--
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
Verily I believe a few of these stanzas of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
have more effect in moving the average human soul than forty prose
sermons and a hundred prose tracts. And why? Because they express, not
mere thoughts, not mere arguments, but a mood, a disposition, a soul.
Verse-poetry can never die. It is for evermore inseparable from the
art of communicating the spirit in words.
* * * * *
The supreme literary gift then is the power to embody even the most
subtle conception in a communicable shape. And is this a mere knack,
with which brain-power has little or nothing to do? Not so. Observe what
the task implies on the part of the writer, over and above his perfect
control of words.
It implies, to wit, that he shall first realize those conceptions
luminously to himself. Before he can utter them, his brain must have
grasped them, formed a vivid picture of them. Most of us, when we become
aware of a fancy or a feeling within ourselves, are unable to get it
into focus. The power of undergoing a deep emotion, of thinking a
far-reaching thought, of experiencing a keen sensation, is, I assert,
by no means rare in the world. But as soon as we begin to look
steadfastly at it and try to realize to ourselves exactly what it is
like and what it means; when we ask ourselves, "what precisely is it I
am thinking and feeling?" it evades us; it begins to break up and fade
away, like a phantom or like mist. It is as when we think of some one's
face, filled with a certain expression. The face starts out before our
mind's eye, and for a moment we see it well and truly. But for most of
us, unless we are painters, or possess the gift which might make us
painters, it is impossible to keep that face, with that expression,
steadily before our inward vision. As we gaze upon it, it changes and
passes into a blur and refuses to be held.
But the mental retina of the great painter can hold such things as he
has seen till he transfers them to the canvas; so can the brain of the
great masters who paint for us in words, till they embody them in
delicate prose or exquisite poetry. The lack of power to express often
comes of a lack of this power to realize; and that power, I believe, is
what is meant by "the vision and the faculty divine," and by "shaping
imagination," and by other phrases which get so bandied to and fro that
the world almost ceases to attach any meaning to them at all.
I remember some years ago, in an essay on _Literary Judgment_, asserting
that the quality which chiefly distinguished the immortal works from the
transient was sincerity, single-heartedness, reality of intention and
love of the work for the work's sake. That was only a partial view of
the truth. It is right in a measure, since that sincerity, that absence
of make-believe, in the literary creation is a prime necessity; but it
is not sufficient. It is, indeed, a prime necessity, because it means
that the superlative writer must write at first hand of things genuinely
conceived and realized by his very self. It is, indeed, a prime
necessity, because you cannot conjure up vividly and hold in steady view
the communicable picture of your feeling or your thought, _unless_ you
feel it or think it with all your own being. But the sincerity is only a
pre-supposed condition. The supreme literary quality is the power to
realize the picture and so body forth the thing thought or felt. The
great dramatic genius, for example, first realizes a character and his
thoughts and feelings, and then, identifying himself with that
character, gives them expression. When Homer imagines Odysseus
descending to the nether world and meeting there the shades of heroes
whom he had known at Troy, his Odysseus accosts this one or that and
receives answer as befits the person. But to Ajax, son of Telamon,
Odysseus had indirectly done a wrong, and caused his suicide, and, when
the ghost of Ajax appears, Odysseus speaks to it gentle and soothing
words of explanation and self-defence. And what does that proud injured
Ajax reply? Well, on Homer's brain the picture is very vivid. His brain
becomes practically the brain of the very Ajax, and the continuation
shows it: "So I spake, but he answered me not a word, and passed on to
Erebus after the other spirits of the departed dead." That silence of
Ajax is truer than the most scathing of speeches.
So is it with Shakespeare. He sees his characters and realizes their
sensations so vividly that his brain and feelings become the brain and
feelings of his creations; and thus only does his Lear say with such
perfect naturalness, "Pray you, undo this button." Hence, too, all the
distinctness of character in his lifelike men and women, be it Hamlet or
Falstaff, Cordelia or Lady Macbeth.
"Imagination," "the shaping gift of imagination," is this power of first
presenting a thing to your own brain with luminousness. For once
etymology lends real aid. _Imaginatio_ is "the making of pictures." It
is inseparable from the power of perfect expression.
Why did the people of Verona whisper of Dante, "Yonder is the man who
has been in Hell?" Simply because of this power. Dante saw the place of
torment in his imagination, not as any of us might see it, vaguely
terrible, but clear in every dread and horrid detail. And, having so
seen it, he lends to that seeing the gift of expression, and with a few
simple verbs and nouns and plain forceful similes he makes his readers
see what he had seen. So did it come about that he was regarded as the
man who had actually "been in Hell." How far does Milton stand below him
in this imaginative vision! Milton, too, describes an Inferno, but it
lacks the convincingness of one who has seen it for himself. We could
never say that Milton was the man who had "been in Hell."
What is the special power of Carlyle in his dealings with history? It is
the power of summoning up visions of the past, standing out clear to
the last particular, as if lightning illuminated them against the
background of the ages.
I do not know whether any better definition of imagination can be given
than that of Ruskin in his _Modern Painters_. "Imagination is the power
of seeing anything we describe as if it were real, so that, looking at
it as we describe, points may strike us which will give a vividness to
the description that would not have occurred to vague memory, or been
easily borrowed from the expressions of other writers." I do not say we
can necessarily describe a thing _because_ we so see it, but I do say
that we cannot describe it _unless_ we so see it. Therefore the supreme
literary gift of communicating exactly what we think and feel, exactly
as we think and feel it, involves no mere control of language, but,
therewith, an imaginative brain to realize conceptions as vivid
pictures. To combine these powers is to be a genius of great rarity.
In one part of the _Inferno_ of Dante it rains fire. To say that much
would be enough for the ordinary writer. But Dante not only sees fire
falling; he sees exactly how it falls, and the picture in his mind
becomes the picture in ours, when he simply says that it fell silently,
steadily "as fall broad flakes of snow when winds are still." Perfectly
easy, is it not? Yes, for Dante. But for the ordinary writer it would
have been no more than "A rain of fire." But what manner of rain, O thou
ordinary and inadequate writer? We do not, indeed, want scorching
rhetoric and verse piled on verse. We want the "inevitable" word, the
simple and the home-coming, the Dantesque. Byron now and again exhibits
the power. Mazeppa is bound naked on the wild horse, and--
The skies spun like a mighty wheel,
I saw the trees like drunkards reel,
And a slight flash sprang o'er my eyes,
Which saw no further....
* * * * *