A description in the Iliad or the Odyssey, unlike one in the AEneid or in
most modern writers, is the swift and natural observation of a man as he
is shaped by life. It is a refinement of the primary hungers and has the
least possible of what is merely scholarly or exceptional. It is, above
all, never too observant, too professional, and when the book is closed
we have had our energies enriched, for we have been in the mid-current.
We have never seen anything Odysseus could not have seen while his
thought was of the Cyclops, or Achilles when Briseis moved him to
desire. In the art of the greatest periods there is something careless
and sudden in all habitual moods though not in their expression, because
these moods are a conflagration of all the energies of active life. In
primitive times the blind man became a poet as he became a fiddler in
our villages, because he had to be driven out of activities all his
nature cried for before he could be contented with the praise of life.
And often it is Villon or Verlaine with impediments plain to all, who
sings of life with the ancient simplicity. Poets of coming days, when
once more it will be possible to write as in the great epochs, will
recognise that their sacrifice shall be to refuse what blindness and
evil name, or imprisonment at the outsetting, denied to men who missed
thereby the sting of a deliberate refusal. The poets of the ages of
silver need no refusal of life, the dome of many-coloured glass is
already shattered while they live. They look at life deliberately and as
if from beyond life, and the greatest of them need suffer nothing but
the sadness that the saints have known. This is their aim, and their
temptation is not a passionate activity, but the approval of their
fellows, which comes to them in full abundance only when they delight in
the general thoughts that hold together a cultivated middle-class, where
irresponsibilities of position and poverty are lacking; the things that
are more excellent among educated men who have political preoccupations,
Augustus Caesar's affability, all that impersonal fecundity which muddies
the intellectual passions. Ben Jonson says in the 'Poetaster,' that even
the best of men without Promethean fire is but a hollow statue, and a
studious man will commonly forget after some forty winters that of a
certainty Promethean fire will burn somebody's fingers. It may happen
that poets will be made more often by their sins than by their virtues,
for general praise is unlucky, as the villages know, and not merely as I
imagine--for I am superstitious about these things--because the praise
of all but an equal enslaves and adds a pound to the ball at the ankle
with every compliment.
All energy that comes from the whole man is as irregular as the
lightning, for the communicable and forecastable and discoverable is a
part only, a hungry chicken under the breast of the pelican, and the
test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the
delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.
I knew an old man who had spent his whole life cutting hazel and privet
from the paths, and in some seventy years he had observed little but had
many imaginations. He had never seen like a naturalist, never seen
things as they are, for his habitual mood had been that of a man stirred
in his affairs; and Shakespeare, Tintoretto, though the times were
running out when Tintoretto painted, nearly all the great men of the
Renaissance, looked at the world with eyes like his. Their minds were
never quiescent, never as it were in a mood for scientific observations,
always an exaltation, never--to use known words--founded upon an
elimination of the personal factor; and their attention and the
attention of those they worked for dwelt constantly with what is present
to the mind in exaltation. I am too modern fully to enjoy Tintoretto's
'Creation of the Milky Way,' I cannot fix my thoughts upon that glowing
and palpitating flesh intently enough to forget, as I can the
make-believe of a fairy tale, that heavy drapery hanging from a cloud,
though I find my pleasure in _King Lear_ heightened by the make-believe
that comes upon it all when the fool says: 'This prophecy Merlin shall
make, for I live before his time';--and I always find it quite natural,
so little does logic in the mere circumstance matter in the finest art,
that Richard's and Richmond's tents should be side by side. I saw with
delight _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ when Mr. Carr revived it, and
found it none the worse because the apprentice acted a whole play upon
the spur of the moment and without committing a line to heart. When Ben
Jonson's _Epicoene_ rammed a century of laughter into the two hours'
traffic, I found with amazement that almost every journalist had put
logic on the seat, where our lady imagination should pronounce that
unjust and favouring sentence her woman's heart is ever plotting, and
had felt bound to cherish none but reasonable sympathies and to resent
the baiting of that grotesque old man. I have been looking over a book
of engravings made in the eighteenth century from those wall-pictures
of Herculaneum and Pompeii that were, it seems, the work of journeymen
copying from finer paintings, for the composition is always too good for
the execution. I find in great numbers an indifference to obvious logic,
to all that the eye sees at common moments. Perseus shows Andromeda the
death she lived by in a pool, and though the lovers are carefully drawn
the reflection is upside down that we may see it the better. There is
hardly an old master who has not made known to us in some like way how
little he cares for what every fool can see and every knave can praise.
The men who imagined the arts were not less superstitious in religion,
understanding the spiritual relations, but not the mechanical, and
finding nothing that need strain the throat in those gnats the floods of
Noah and Deucalion, and in Joshua's moon at Ascalon.