Even in this age of science, we entertain such feelings. And if we
ourselves feel so, it is simply because humanity is so constituted, and
no science, no democracy, no learning, invention or legislation can ever
drive out human nature from human beings. It is on grounds like these
that Matthew Arnold declares, "More and more mankind will discover that
we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to
sustain us. Without Poetry our science will appear incomplete."
"Incomplete" is a right word, though a very weak one; "incomplete," not
untrue, not pernicious, but terribly inadequate. For there are two
manners of looking at the universe and at the life of men, and human
nature demands that we should exercise and enjoy them both. "The words
poetry, philosophy, art, science," says Renan, "betoken not so much
different objects proposed for the intellectual activity of man, as
different manners of looking at the same object--which object is
existence in all its manifestations," and, "if we understand by poetry
the faculty which the soul has of being touched in a certain manner, of
giving forth a certain sound of a particular and indefinable nature in
the face of the beauty of things, he who is not a poet is not a man."
True poetry does not imply fiction, unreality, misrepresentation. The
true poet is not a deluded dreamer and a visionary. The scientist tells
us certain facts about existing things, the poet draws forth the
beauties and suggestions of those facts, brings them into moral and
emotional connexion with ourselves, makes them, at his best, effective
on our conduct. Human nature can never be satisfied with the bare
objective facts. It must "disengage the elements of beauty" and goodness
from them.
It is too generally assumed that to know a thing scientifically is to
divest it of all touching beauty, of all romantic glamour, of all
spiritual suggestion,--to make it, in fact, incapable of yielding
poetry. We can, indeed, no longer call the sun a god and construct myths
of Phoebus, nor can we seriously picture the moon descending to dally
with Endymion. We can no longer see Hamadryads in the oaks or Naiads in
the streams. We do not hear Zeus or Thor in the thunderclap, nor
recognize in volcanic eruptions the struggles of imprisoned Titans
breathing flame. But what of that? Does the essence of poetry lie at all
in myths and superstitions? Because we know of what the sun is made, and
how many miles distant he is, do we find his risings and settings less
moving in their endless splendours? Do we less marvel at the stupendous
order of the solar and astral circles? Do we feel less awe before the
infinitude of space and the insignificance of our own selves? Do
waterfalls "haunt us like a passion" any the less because the water is
chemically known as H_2O and because we believe no longer in nymphs and
water-sprites? On the contrary, if there is one fact in the history of
literature more certain than another, it is the fact that the passion
for natural beauty and the emotions it evokes are things of very modern
date. In France Rousseau, in England Wordsworth, are practically the
first to give to them that loving rapture of expression into which we of
this scientific age enter so naturally.
It is true that Keats, in a moment of that petulance which is one of his
less happy characteristics, writes like this:--
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine,
Unweave a rainbow.
But assuredly it was in his haste that Keats let slip those lines. To
him at least, loving as he did the "principle of beauty in all things,"
to him, to whom a "thing of beauty is a joy for ever," the rainbow was
not given in the dull catalogue of common things. Nor is it to us,
though we might render ever so scientifically accurate an account of the
origin of rainbows.
Shelley, who had dabbled in chemistry for the love of science, knew, as
well as we know, that a cloud is but moisture evaporated from the earth,
that there is no Valkyrie in it. But that does not hinder him from
making such a cloud a thing of life, and causing it to sing--
I wield the flail of the lashing hail
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Neither his studies in natural science, nor his economic and moral
readings in Godwin and Condorcet could repress, or even tended to
repress, the flight of Shelley's imagination. Nor did Goethe's original
and almost professional scientific work in botany, anatomy, and optics
prevent the creation of his _Faust_ or the singing of his touching
ballads. And when we question the compatibility of historical knowledge
with the poetry of epic or romantic creations, do we suppose that
Tennyson, while writing the _Idylls of the King_, believed in the
stories of Arthur, of Lancelot, of Galahad, or of the Holy Grail? When
Morris composed the _Earthly Paradise_, had his imagination no freedom
of flight because stubborn facts of history and geography clipped its
pinions?
The truth is that there are two ways of looking at existing things, two
ways of handling them; and neither way is false. The scientist's way we
all understand. It is the way of the microscope and the crucible. It
arrives at definite physical facts. It sets forth the material
constitution and physical laws of objects. But to the poet, says Mrs.
Browning--
Every natural flower which grows on earth
Implies a flower on the spiritual side.
And what is true of flowers is true of suns and stars and living
creatures and all that science contemplates. Science is knowledge, while
poetry, asserts Wordsworth, is "the breath and finer spirit of all
knowledge"; it is "the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all science." There is a poetic truth, and there is a
scientific truth, compatible one with the other, complementary one to
the other. Perhaps the most prosaic mind that ever existed was that of
Jeremy Bentham, and "poetry," said that worthy, "is misrepresentation."
One may be pardoned for a passing impatience when the poetical side of
man is treated as a kind of amiable delusion; when one hears the shallow
argument, containing a begged question, that, inasmuch as the poet
imagines in things what is really not there at all, he is so far a
wanderer from the truth and an enemy of science. The answer is very
brief; the poet does not imagine something which is not there. A beauty
or a suggestion is a truth, and the poet sees a beauty or a suggestion.
He would indeed be false and an enemy to science if he said that a
primrose by the river's brim was a buttercup, or that it was red when it
is yellow, but it is no fiction when he declares that the primrose tells
him this or that of nature or of God. It may not tell the scientist
anything of the kind, but that is because the scientist does not look
for such a thing in it, does not understand or seek to understand its
language. "The eye of the intellect," says Carlyle, "sees in all objects
what it brings with it the means of seeing." Say, if you like, that it
is really the poet himself who puts the language, the message, into
flower or tree or waterfall. That only removes the argument a step
further back. How is he prompted to find such language there?
And who knows but that, by his exquisite sensibility and gift of
sympathy, the poet may be discovering truths more valuable to us in the
end than all the truths of science? The Newtons and Faradays and Lyells
perform their several tasks in the region of great literal physical
facts and laws; the Shakespeares and Wordsworths and Shelleys perform
theirs in the region of things ideal, in the expression of potent
suggestions and stimulations. We cannot afford to treat as weak
fantastic enthusiasts those to whom
The meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Nor can we too soon recognize the fact that what the world requires is
the combined result of both forms of genius. It requires that the genius
of science and the genius of poetry should unite their powers and their
discoveries into one grand harmony of happiness in faith and hope and
love.
One can do no better than quote from Wordsworth a passage which shows
how the moral mood is transformed through the medium of the eye, when
the eye gazes with poetic sympathy on nature:--
O then what soul was his, when on the top
Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
Rise up and bathe the world in light! He looked--
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none
Nor any voice of joy. His spirit drank
The spectacle; sensation, soul and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
There are people who find little satisfaction in Wordsworth. His
reputation is a puzzle to them. They look for fine passages and too
rarely discover them. They judge him by the test of mere brilliance of
language, not by the higher and truer poetic gift, the power of seeing
"into the life of things," the power and exquisite feeling whereby
outward facts are brought to serve as inward forces.
And, quite apart from this function as the receiver of impressions and
the communicator of them; quite apart from the function of the poet as
moral and spiritual teacher working side by side with that teacher of
facts, the man of science, there is room, and will always be room, for
the artist-poet who simply refreshes and entertains. For poetry lies
also in epics and romances, in "feigned history" and descriptions, when
the poet, as Longinus says, "by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary
emotion of the soul," makes it seem to us that we behold those things
which he paints--a feat which he performs through his gift of
imagination, whereby he bodies forth the shapes of things unknown and
gives to airy nothings of beauty and delight and pathos a local
habitation and a name. The world of the future will find refreshment in
such creations no less than the world of the present. We know that
romantic novels are unreal, but we read them with keen enjoyment none
the less. So those romantic poems the _Idylls of the King_ and _The
Earthly Paradise_, like _The Tempest_, or the _Faerie Queene_, though
they cause us no real illusion as to fact, nevertheless absorb our
interest, and charm us with their unliteral beauties. We know in our
hearts that there is no magic and no fairyland. But it is a pitiably
dull and mollusc mind which finds no delight in peering through those
Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
There remains, then, this function too of the poet who gives "exquisite
expression" to an "exquisite impression"--the function of entertaining
us nobly with tender thought and touching story, embodied in words of
beauty, and graced with melodious cadences. Of such sort is the writer
of the _Earthly Paradise_, who confesses his own modest aims in words
like these:--
Of heaven or hell I have no power to sing;
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.
But rather, when aweary of your mirth,
From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh,
And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,
Grudge every minute as it passes by,
Made the more mindful that the sweet days die,
Remember me a little then, I pray,
The idle singer of an empty day.
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beat with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
We have dealt with the poet's place in the world of growing scientific
light. We might also treat of the poet's place in the world of social
progress. But he is a bold man who will prophesy whither society is
tending. To some of us, its evolution has no terrors. But, whatever be
the course of institutions, whatever the changing shapes of the social
organism, there is one conviction we may most firmly hold. It is that,
as ecstasies of love and grief, hope and fear, joy and suffering, must
still exist, so the poet will ever exist to give them utterance. The
drama, the lyric, the elegy, can never be effete so long as men have
hearts and feel with them.
But why, it may be asked, should all this exquisite expression of nature
and man and life take shape in verse? Why should we not, with Carlyle,
declare verse out of date, an artificial thing, which expresses under
crippling encumbrances what could be expressed in prose more clearly and
more truthfully? To this question we may reply that rhymes and
recurrences of equal syllables are indeed no essentials of true poetry.
Poetry has existed without them, and will exist without them. But, if
not rhymes and equal syllables, yet rhythm and melody, moving
concurrences of sounds, must for all time be elements of poetic
utterance. The reason should be manifest. There is an indefinable
sympathy between the spoken sound and the conceiving mood of the poet.
The poet conceives in moments of unusual sensibility, his mental part
is vibrating, and that sensibility lends a corresponding movement to his
language. When a poet says of himself--
I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing,
he expresses the truth that rhythm and melody lend themselves
spontaneously to an inspiring thought. Poetry, like good music, comes of
the possession of the movement. The mood in which poetry is conceived is
the same mood in which men burst forth without premeditation into song.
The thoughts which come to the poet in his exaltation are, therefore,
naturally wedded to melody and cadence.
Moreover, not only is a rhythmic music the natural utterance of
impassioned thought for him who speaks. It is the necessary instrument
for inducing the proper, the receptive, mood in him who hears. We know
how it is with music, when all the air is vibrating and chanting with
some vast organ-swell. We know how we are stirred to our inmost depths
simply by mere harmony and sequence of sounds. We do not know why it is
so, why our mood should be attuned to sorrow, gaiety, enthusiasm,
heroism, meditation, by the hearing of music in its various kinds. We do
not know, either, why the mere shapes of the sublime architecture of
some great abbey or cathedral, or the blended colours of its
deep-damasked window-stains, should fill our hearts with devout or
poignant aspirations. Yet we know that the fact is so. And it is the
same with poetry. The rhythm and melody which come spontaneously from
the poet's mood dispose the hearer in the self-same way; they fit him to
receive what the other brings. Verse, as we now understand that term,
poetry need not be. But though it may look like prose because the lines
stretch all across the page and cannot be measured by so many iambics or
anapaests, yet, if it be real poetry, heart-felt and heart-moving, it
will be but a delusive prose, a prose of infinitely subtle rhythms and
harmonies. It will be as far removed as the Homeric hexameter from the
pedestrian motion of cold argument.
Poetry will never fail us until nature fails. We may miss the
transcendent voices now, but we have had during this century more than a
century's usual share, and with the first widespread rise of some new
moral fervour or lofty hope and aim the great poet cannot be wanting to
give it shape in thrilling verse.
Poetry will never fail us. The poetry of nature will not fail us. So
long as the sun shall each night and morning glorify the heavens with
his inexhaustible splendours, or the majestic moon ride in her
mysterious silence between the everchanging isles of cloud; so long as
innumerable starry worlds shine down their unspeakable peace into human
hearts; so long as the flower shall open out its loveliness, dance in
the breeze, shed its perfumes, and then close its petals in sleep and
drink in the refreshment of the unfailing dew; so long as the tree shall
put forth its tender greenery of leaf in the spring, blossom into gold
and fire in summer and in the autumn bow down with fruits; so long as
water shall leap and foam and thunder in cataracts down the
mountain-side, or ripple and smile over the pebble or under the fern--so
long shall the heart of man respond to sun and moon and stars, to flower
and tree and stream, and there shall be poetry.
And as man's vision, intensified by the lens of science, pierces deeper
and deeper into the universe of the ineffably great and the illimitably
small, and as his wonder and awe increase with what they feed upon, so
will the finer souls of humankind be thrilled and thrilled again with
rich new suggestions and exquisite emotions, and they shall express them
in poetry.
The poetry of man will not fail us. So long as man has a heart wherewith
to love another better than himself, to feel the joy of possession or
the pang of loss, to glow with pride at a nation's glories or mourn in
its dejection, so long shall the lyric and the elegy, in whatsoever
shape, create themselves ever afresh.
Till all our life, its institutions, and its beliefs are perfect: till
man has no doubts, no fears, no hopes: till he has analysed all his
emotions and despises them: till the heavens above and the earth beneath
can be read like a printed scroll: till nature has yielded up her last
mystery: till that day poetry will exist among men.
And we may dare to assert that the future of poetry is destined to be
greater than its past, that Tennyson's prayer will be fulfilled--
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell,
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before
But vaster,
And the expression of that music will be poetry.
* * * * *
A SELECTION FROM THE
CATALOGUE OF BOOKS
PUBLISHED BY
Thomas C. Lothian,
100, FLINDERS STREET,
MELBOURNE.
INDEX OF TITLES.
PAGE
Australians Yet 9
Bush, The 7
Bushland Ballads 9
Dark Tower, The 12
Dawnward 7
Dominions of the Boundary 7
Eating for Health 8
Ginger Talks on Business 6
Guide to the Study of Australian Butterflies 9
House of Broken Dreams, The 5
Keeyuga Cookery Book, The 11
Later Litanies 5
Litanies of Life 5
Mateship 9
Mosquitoes: Their Habits and Distribution 9
No Breakfast; or, the Secret of Life 12
Peradventure 12
Poems by Jennings Carmichael 9
Poems by Hubert Church 10
Poems by Bernard O'Dowd 9
Poems by William Gay 9
Poems of Henry C. Kendall 9
Poems by Jessie Mackay 9
Poetical Works of William Gay 10
Poetry Militant 7
Rosemary 6
Satyrs and Sunlight 10
Sea and Sky 10
Sea Spray and Smoke Drift 9
Seven Deadly Sins, The 7
Silent Land and Other Verses, The 7
Stranger's Friend, The 9
Spirit of the Child 3
Things Worth Thinking About 4
Told in the Dormitory 6
Woman's Work 11
* * * * *
THE SPIRIT OF THE CHILD
BY TULLIE WOLLASTON.
_Pott 4th._ _224 pages._ _Price_, 5/-; _posted_, 5/4
_Every Home in Australia_ should possess a copy of "_The Spirit of
the Child_"--and, in fact, _every teacher and child lover
everywhere_.
This is a distinctly original book, with quaint gleams of humour and a
spiritual atmosphere, impossible to describe, but the very thing to
rejoice the hearts of fathers and mothers who know how to give good
gifts to their children. Also it is even more valuable for the parents
themselves.
A father, ordered abroad for his health, and realizing how precarious
life is, feels impelled to gather up in some interesting way the vital
points of his varied experience for the children he loves so well. He
feels, as so many fathers do, the veil of shyness between parent and
child, and recognizes how few are the opportunities, in the rough and
tumble of life, for the fitly spoken word to confirm "what has been
silently indrawn by contact of love." A passionate Nature lover himself,
he takes for unique treasures of Australia--a flower, a bird, a tree,
and a precious stone--and treats them in a way to quicken every earnest
heart, and foster the child spirit of bright interest and loving
humility.
Two of these subjects are illustrated by six fine three-colour
pictures--those of the _Black Opals_, probably being finer reproductions
of _Gems of Colour_ than any ever previously made anywhere.
A quaint love story linked to the rest of the subject matter by the same
mystic touch, lends variety to the Book and strengthens the one golden
thread of purpose, which is briefly summed up in the title.
* * * * *
THINGS WORTH THINKING ABOUT
BY T. G. TUCKER, Litt. D.
PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE IN UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE.
_Crown 8vo. 288 pages. Bound in full cloth. Price, 3/6; posted, 3/9._
In this volume, Education, Science, Literature, Culture and Cant and
other kindred subjects are treated in a manner that is full of vitality
and attracts. This is a reprint of a book that has been out of print and
quite unprocurable for many years.
CONTENTS.--Our Earliest Ancestors and their Beliefs. The
Nature and Province of Poetry. Literature, Science and Education.
Culture and Cant. The Teachings of History. The Teachings of
Travel. Literary Judgment.
"This book is singularly well named. The last lecture of literary
judgment is particularly interesting and valuable. It is full of
suggestion as to young journalists, and all persons interested in the
study of 'that literature which maketh a full man,' and which must
spring from the real blood of the heart, and the real flame of the
thought."--_Otago Daily Times._
"These seven essays are distinctively worth while. We especially commend
his essay on the Teachings of History, which is packed with wisdom, to
every one who is seriously interested in the science of politics."
"In Australia he should be known as a public benefactor. The volume
before us being nothing less than a contribution to the
Commonwealth."--_The Athenaeum._
* * * * *
LATER LITANIES
BY KATHLEEN WATSON.
AUTHOR OF "LITANIES OF LIFE."
_Bound in full cloth. Artistically blocked in gold. Price, 2/6; posted,
2/8._
This new book by Kathleen Watson is sure to receive a friendly welcome
from the hundreds of friends which she made with her previous books.
This volume is, perhaps, more mature, and will give greater pleasure
than any of her former books. All readers should secure a copy of this
new book.
* * * * *
LITANIES OF LIFE
BY KATHLEEN WATSON.
AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF BROKEN DREAMS," "THE GAIETY OF FATMA."
_Crown 8vo. Bound in full blue cloth, gold blocked. Price, 2/6; posted,
2/8._
This is the fifth edition of a remarkable volume. Already over 20,000
copies have been sold--and little wonder, for it is a book to read and
re-read. It will rivet the attention of the reader, and hold it right
through. It pulsates with human interest, with human feeling, love and
joy and sorrow.
"I read a few pages, and after that there was no laying down the book.
Fancy a woman with a powerful, perhaps somewhat morbid imagination, with
intense emotions, with a tendency to brood over all that is sad in the
human lot; and finally, with the power to concentrate a whole panorama
of suffering into a phrase--fancy a woman so gifted sitting down with
the resolve to crush into a few words the infinite tale of all the whole
race of her sex can suffer, and you have an idea of what this remarkable
book is like."--_T.P.'s Weekly._
"The reader will lay down the book as I did, with a feeling of profound
sympathy and gratitude to the unknown writer, in whose pages they can
hear the tremulous throb of an intense emotion, which, however, does not
obscure the finer and strongest note of heroic resolve."--_The late W.
T. Stead._
* * * * *
THE HOUSE OF BROKEN DREAMS. A MEMORY
BY KATHLEEN WATSON.
_Second Edition, Crown 8vo, bound in full cloth. Price, 2/6; posted,
2/8._
_A Review_: "She who gave us the well-loved 'Litanies of Life' clothes
beautiful thoughts in beautiful language.... As a picture of idyllic
love and sympathy between mother and son, even unto death--and
beyond--it has rarely been surpassed, and helps us to realize the
wondrous truth that 'love is heaven, and heaven is love.'"--_The
Register._
* * * * *
THE BEST BOYS' BOOK OF STORIES.
TOLD IN THE DORMITORY
BY R. G. JENNINGS.
_In Handsome Cloth Cover, and with Frontispiece in Colour. Price, 3/6;
posted, 3/9._
[Illustration]
Mr. R. G. Jennings is one of the best-known teachers in Melbourne.
Hundreds of boys belonging to the Church of England Grammar School have
listened with breathless interest to these stories, told them by their
master after lessons, "In the Dormitory." The boys all voted the stories
so good that the best twelve were collected and are now published.
The stories are clean, wholesome and exciting, and many an elder
brother, as well as the father, of a family, has picked up the volume to
give it a rapid glance, and has had to read story after story, only
putting the book reluctantly down when the last page was reached.
If you want to read a good school-boy book of adventuresome yarns, or
make some small youth happy, then get a copy of "Told in the Dormitory."
Just look at what the papers have said about it:--
"Entertaining yarns, well told, without a hint of padding or
affectation."--_The Athenaeum_.
"The sort of yarns boys love."--_The New Age._