TWO LECTURES
INTRODUCTORY TO THE
STUDY OF POETRY.
=London=: C. J. CLAY +AND+ SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AVE MARIA LANE.
=Glasgow=: 50, WELLINGTON STREET.
[Illustration]
=Leipzig=: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
=New York=: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
=Bombay=: E. SEYMOUR HALE.
TWO LECTURES
INTRODUCTORY TO THE
STUDY OF POETRY
BY THE
+Rev.+ H. C. BEECHING M.A.
LATE CLARK LECTURER AT TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
PROFESSOR OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY AT KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON,
CHAPLAIN TO THE HON. SOC. OF LINCOLN’S INN.
CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1901
[_All Rights reserved._]
=Cambridge=:
PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
PASSION AND IMAGINATION IN POETRY.
The unsatisfactoriness of definitions of poetry arises usually from
one or other of two causes. If the definition is that of a critic, it
is the resultant of a long analytical process, and therefore not very
intelligible apart from the process by which it has been arrived at; if
it is the definition of a poet, it is certain to contain that element
of poetry which it professes to explain. Nevertheless, the most helpful
_aperçus_ into poetry are those which the poets themselves have given
us, and of them all none is more helpful than that inspired parenthesis
in which Milton one day summed up its characteristics as “simple,
sensuous, and passionate.”
We may presume that by his first epithet Milton intended that
simplicity which is another name for sincerity. He meant that a poet
must look at the world frankly and with open eyes; with the spirit,
though with more than the wisdom, of a child. We sometimes express
another side of the same truth by saying that poetry is “universal,”
meaning that it cares nothing for superficial and transient fashions,
but is interested only “in man, in nature, and in human life,” in
their permanent elements. This first epithet seems to fix beyond
dispute an indispensable quality of all poetry. If a writer is
insincere, or if he is conventional and fashionable, we are sure,
whatever his airs and graces, that he is no poet. By “sensuous” it
is probable that Milton meant what, in more technical language, we
should describe as “concrete.” Poetry deals with things, and it deals
with people; it sings of birds and flowers and stars; it sings of
the wrath of Achilles, the wanderings of Ulysses and Æneas, the woes
of King Œdipus, the problems of Brutus and Hamlet; whatever be the
thought or the emotion it is concerned with, it is concerned with them
as operating on a particular occasion; it has no concern with the
intellect or the emotions or the will in abstraction from this or that
wise or passionate or wilful person[1]. By his third epithet Milton, as
most will agree, touched, or almost touched, the heart of the matter.
We all conceive prose to be an adequate vehicle for our level feelings,
but as soon as we are deeply moved and wish to express our emotion we
instinctively turn to the poets. Wordsworth is at one with Milton in
fixing upon passion as of the essence of poetry, which he in one place
defines as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” It does not
matter for poetry what the emotion is that overflows; it may be love
or hate, pity or fear, awe or indignation, joy or sorrow; what matters
for poetry is that some passion there should be, for some particular
object, and that it should be sincerely and deeply felt.
Essential, however, as passion is, so that where there is no passion
there can be no poetry, in saying passion we have not said the last
word. Anyone may prove this to himself by a simple reminiscence. He
may at some time have been in love, for, according to Patmore, “Love
wakes men once a lifetime each”; and, perhaps, in a mood of exaltation
he may have taken pen and paper for a sonnet to his mistress’ eyebrow;
but the poetry did not come; or, if something came, in a calmer mood
he recognized that it was not poetry. Or we may illustrate from other
passions. At the Queen’s Jubilee a few years since we were all
passionately loyal, and the morning newspapers vied with each other in
producing odes; but no one could mistake any one of them for poetry.
Or, the other day, again, when the Rennes verdict was announced, the
intelligence of England was roused to a passion of indignation. I
took up my weekly gazette the next Saturday morning and found that
indignation had made a good many verses, in none of which was there a
tincture of poetry. There was much cursing and swearing, and appealing
to Heaven for vengeance; but the point of view was merely that of “the
man in the street.”
These simple examples will suffice to show that poetry requires a
manner of viewing things which is not that of the average man, but
is individual to the poet; it requires, in a word, genius. One could
hardly expect Milton to point this out; having genius himself he would
assume that everyone else had genius; he would assume that we all had
the power of looking at the world not only _frankly_ but _freshly_,
because he would not understand any other way of looking at it. Now,
it is this fresh outlook and insight, this power of viewing things and
people out of the associations in which the rest of mankind habitually
view them, that is the root of the whole matter. In the world of nature
we find the poets moved even to passion by objects that we hardly
notice, or from long familiarity have come to ignore. Their strong
emotion arises from their fresh vision. By means of that fresh vision
the world never ceases to be an interesting place to them.
“By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough’s rustling,
By a daisy whose leaves spread
Shut when Titan goes to bed,
Or a shady bush or tree,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature’s beauties can
In some other wiser man.”
So sang Wither of the Poetic Muse; and Blake expresses the same truth
in his inspired doggrel:
“What to others a trifle appears
Fills me full of smiles and tears.”
The converse of the proposition also holds true: what to others may
appear facts of the highest importance, may to the poet appear trifles.
Similarly in the world of men we find the poets as much interested in
the least as in the greatest, and we find them unconcerned by many of
the distinctions which to mankind in general appear vital. We find,
for example, Andrew Marvell introducing into his panegyric of Oliver
Protector a picture of King Charles at his execution, which embalms the
secret of all the cavalier loyalty, and is to-day the oftenest quoted
passage of his poem.
The poet’s subjects, then, are borrowed from any quarter in the whole
range of nature and human experience; “the world is all before him
where to choose”; anything that excites any deep emotion in him is a
fit topic for his verse, and it is our privilege for the moment, so
far as that one experience is concerned, to look through his eyes. In
this way the poets interpret the world to us. They also interpret us
to ourselves. They make adventurous voyages into hitherto unsounded
seas of the human spirit, and bring us word of their discoveries. And
what they thus win becomes an inalienable possession to the race; the
boundaries of humanity are pushed back. This power of interpreting
the world and human life is sometimes spoken of as an idealizing
faculty, and no exception can be taken to the term so long as it is
not explained to mean that the poet tricks up what he sees in false
lights in order to please us. For anyone who considers the best poetry,
whether about the universe or man’s heart,--and it is only the best
that must determine the genus--will admit that, so far as he has
trusted himself to it, it has convinced him of its entire veracity. It
is idealized only in the sense that a landscape is idealized by the
removal of the accidental and commonplace details, which sufficed to
blind others to the beauty that the painter distinguished. The artist,
poet or painter, sees the light that never was on sea or land until he
saw it; but when he has once seen it and shown it us, we can all see
that it is there, and is not merely a figment of his fancy. This mode
of viewing things, which by its freshness reveals, or interprets, or
idealizes, is what is meant by Poetical Imagination.
But now that that most terrifying of technical terms has been
mentioned, it may be well to make a short summary of the various senses
in which the word is habitually employed, in order to observe what all,
or any, of them have in common, and how they connect one with another.
(_a_) When a psychologist speaks of imagination he is not thinking of
poetry; he means by the word the power of summoning again before the
mind’s eye vivid images of what has been once seen. He bids us look
carefully at our breakfast-table, and then, closing our eyes, notice
how much of it we can recall, how clear or dim an image. Whether
skill in this memory-picturing has any link with poetical imagination
it would be hard to say; certainly to no one would a power of vividly
recalling images be of greater service. The faculty seems to be
entirely distinct from the power of attention and close observation.
(_b_) A more familiar usage of the word is that which makes it
almost a synonym for sympathy--the power of projecting self into the
circumstances of others. We know to our cost that many men and women
are sadly to seek in this faculty, and it seems to be no especial
prerogative of poets, though Shelley thought so. He speaks of the poet
as--
“A nerve o’er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of the earth.”
And in his prose essay he says: “A man to be greatly good must imagine
intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of
another, and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species
must become his own”; and he continues, “The great instrument of
moral good is imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by
acting upon the cause” (_Essays_, I. 16). Shelley in this passage is
theorizing too much from his own personal feelings; for it has often
been remarked that poets have been singularly lacking in imagination
of this moral sort, and some have been conspicuous for an intense
selfishness in their domestic relations.
(_c_) But the word is also used not of moral, but of intellectual,
sympathy; a power of appreciating, by an act of intuition, the
characteristic qualities of things and people so as to be able to
set out a train of consequences. A celebrated novelist was once
congratulated upon the admirable drawing in one of her books of a
particular school of Dissenters, and she was asked what opportunities
she had enjoyed of studying them. Her reply was that she had once
caught sight of a group of them through a half-opened door as she
mounted a staircase. That is no doubt an extreme case, but it is all
the more useful as an illustration. It helps us to realize how potent
a faculty is the endowment of the dramatist, which can pierce through
human appearance to its essential qualities, can conceive by a sure
instinct how, in given circumstances, the given character must act,
and can represent it to us, because it is vivid to him, in all the
verisimilitude of essential detail. Such imagination is plainly one
large and special side of the faculty of seeing things out of their
commonplace associations. As a branch of the same head would rank the
still rarer power of conceiving types of character, that for certain
reasons have no actual existence in the world we know, such types as
Shakespeare’s Ariel and Caliban and Puck.
(_d_) The word imagination is also used of a faculty which may at first
sight seem the opposite of this--a faculty of seeing people and objects
not as they are in themselves, but coloured by the atmosphere of joy
or gloom through which they are seen. The truth, however, probably is
that nothing at all is, or ever can be, seen out of some atmosphere, a
thing in itself being merely an abstraction; but the greater a poet is,
the more various are his moods, while with lesser men a particular mood
may cover all the objects in their poetical world.
(_e_) Again, the word has a narrower and more technical sense; namely,
the power of detecting resemblances in nature for the purpose of
poetical illustration. This use of the term is not merely freakish,
but connects with that broader and more fundamental sense to which I
have so many times referred, the power and habit of seeing the “common
things that round us lie” out of their commonplace associations, of
seeing them in more subtle and original associations. For it is the
power of bringing together two objects or events that the ordinary
person would never dream of connecting, but in which the poet’s eye has
detected similarity, and which he therefore places side by side so that
one may throw light upon the other. Our thinking, it will be admitted,
is largely associational; one thing recalls another; but it is the
prerogative of poets that the tracks between idea and idea in their
minds are not those of common trade. Recur for a moment to Wither’s
reference to a daisy. We know beforehand what a daisy will suggest
to a child, what to a gardener, what to a botanist; we do not know
beforehand what it will suggest to a poet. It may suggest, as it did to
Chaucer, a crowned queen:--
“A fret of gold she haddë next her hair,
And upon that a white corown she bare
With flourouns smallë, and (I shall not lie)
For all the world right as a daïsy
Ycrowned is with whitë leaves light,
So were the flourouns of her corown white.”
How utterly different from this is the vision of Burns! To him the
daisy is the type of humble cheerfulness, sweet neighbour and meet
companion of the humble and cheerful lark. How different, again, was
the feeling it inspired in Wordsworth! The point to strike home to him
was the touch of kinship between the simplest flower and man in the
fact that both are alive:
“Sweet silent creature
That _breath’st_ with me in sun and air.”
Imagination, used in this restricted sense of the interpretation
of phenomena by comparison, is often contrasted with a weaker form
of itself to which the name of Fancy is given. The distinction was
introduced into these islands by Coleridge, from whom it was borrowed
by Wordsworth; it was then popularized by Leigh Hunt and afterwards
by Ruskin. It has played in the last half century so prominent a part
in the criticism of poetry, that it is perhaps worth while to look it
for once fairly in the face. Coleridge was always promising to give a
disquisition upon Poetical Imagination, but he never kept his word; he
did, however, what was almost better; in the _Biographia Literaria_ he
illustrated his meaning from some passages in his friend’s poems; and
we gather from his comments that he did not at all mean Imagination to
be distinguished from Fancy as the perception of deeper from that of
more superficial resemblances; he wished the term Fancy to be kept for
the use of poetical imagery of all kinds, and the term Imagination to
be used of the poet’s faculty as a creative artist. He speaks of it as
a unifying power, bringing together whatever will help his purpose,
and rejecting all that is impertinent and unessential. He speaks of it
also as a vivifying power, turning “bodies to spirits by sublimation
strange.” That is to say he uses Imagination not so much of a quality
of the poet’s mind as of an artistic power which he exercises, the
power of imposing living form upon dead matter,--he calls it in the
_Ode to Dejection_ “my _shaping_ spirit of imagination”;--but it is not
hard to see that this unifying and vitalizing power depends upon what
is the characteristic essence of imagination, the unanalyzable power
of seeing things freshly and in new and harmonious associations. The
idea must precede the execution, and it is a small matter whether the
term Imagination be employed of the idea or the embodiment. Between
Imagination and Fancy, therefore, as Coleridge conceived them, there
could be no confusion.
The trouble began with Wordsworth. By Imagination, as by Fancy,
Wordsworth practically means the use of poetical imagery; but he
ascribes to the higher faculty the images which occur to the poet not
in his superficial moods, but under the influence of deeper emotion[2].
Leigh Hunt preserved and illustrated this distinction from a wide range
of poets. Mr Ruskin, in the second volume of _Modern Painters_ (p.
163), turned aside from an elaborate disquisition upon Imagination in
painting to speak of poetry. “The Fancy,” he says, “sees the outside,
and so is able to give a portrait of the outside, clear, brilliant,
and full of detail; the Imagination sees the heart and inner nature,
and makes them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted
in its giving of outer detail.” And then follows a remarkable parallel
between the flower passage in _Lycidas_ and that in the _Winter’s
Tale_, greatly to the disadvantage of the former.
It will be remembered that the passage from _Lycidas_ is printed with
marginal notes, as follows:--
“Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, _Imagination._
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, _Nugatory._
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, _Fancy._
The glowing violet, _Imagination._
The musk-rose, and the well-attir’d woodbine, _Fancy and vulgar._
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, _Imagination._
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.” _Mixed._