ON
POETIC INTERPRETATION
OF NATURE
BY
J. C. SHAIRP, LL. D.
PRINCIPAL OF THE UNITED COLLEGE OF ST. SALVATOR AND ST. LEONARD,
ST. ANDREWS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1900
PREFACE.
This small book is the result of some lectures which I had occasion to
give to a large popular audience more than a year ago. I have since
re-written and re-cast them into their present shape. Yet the book still
bears the impress of the peculiar object with which the lectures were
composed, and of the circumstances under which they were delivered.
That object was to add a kind of literary supplement to several longer
and more systematic courses of lectures on physical subjects, such as
Chemistry, Geology, and Physiology, which were delivered at the same
time by Professors who are my colleagues in this College. It seemed to
me that some good might be done, if I could succeed in bringing before
our hearers the truth that, while the several physical sciences explain
each some portion of Nature’s mysteries, or Nature considered under one
special aspect, yet that after all the physical sciences have said their
say, and given their explanations, there remains more behind—another
aspect of Nature—a further truth regarding it, with which, real and
interesting though it is, Science does not intermeddle. The truth on
which especially I wished to fix attention is the relation which exists
between Nature and the sensitive and imaginative soul of man, and the
result or creation which arises from the meeting of these two. That is
a true and genuine result, which it does not fall within the province
of Science to investigate, but which it is one peculiar function of
Poetry to seize, and, as far as may be, to interpret. That the beauty
which looks from the whole face of Nature, and is interwoven with every
fibre of it, is not the less, because it requires a living soul for its
existence, as real a truth as the gravitation of the earth’s particles
or the composition of its materials,—that careful noting and familiar
knowledge of this beauty reveals a new aspect of the world, which will
amply repay the observer,—and that the Poets are, in a special way,
kindlers of sensibility, teachers who make us observe more carefully, and
feel more keenly the wonders that are around us: these are some of the
truths which I wished to bring before my hearers, and which, if I could
in any measure succeed in doing so, would, I felt sure, not be without
mental benefit.
As the audience whom I addressed consisted mainly of young persons whose
chief employments lay elsewhere than in libraries, I felt that I had no
right to reckon on any wide acquaintance with English literature. This
will account for the occurrence in the later chapters of many well-known
passages of English Poetry, which to persons at all conversant with
letters may seem too familiar even for quotation. If, however, the
passages quoted served to illustrate the views I wished to impress, I was
not desirous to travel beyond well-worn paths.
In treating of a subject which has in recent years engaged the thoughts
of many distinguished men, it could not but be that I should often come
across and use the thoughts of others. No doubt it is not easy always
to discriminate between thoughts that have risen spontaneously to one’s
own mind, and those which have been suggested by other writers. Whenever
I have been aware that I was using thoughts not my own, I have tried
to make due acknowledgment of this in the text. At the same time I
would wish to acknowledge here more expressly how much I am conscious
of obligation to three living writers,—to Canon Mozley of Oxford, for
suggestions received from his sermon on “Nature,” and incorporated in
my chapter on “the mystical side of Nature;” to Mr. Stopford Brooke for
suggestive generalizations contained in his “Theology in the English
Poets;” and to Mr. Leslie Stephen for some true and new thoughts in his
recent Essay on Wordsworth’s Ethics; some thoughts derived from the two
latter writers I have tried to interweave into the last chapter of my
book.
As to the book itself, I am well aware how small a portion of how vast
a subject it has even attempted to deal with. But, as the original
lectures were written, so this book is meant, mainly for the young. If,
however, it should induce any of these to look on the outward world with
more heedful and thoughtful eyes, and to win thence for themselves finer
observations, and deeper delight, it will have served a good end.
ST SALVATOR’S COLLEGE, ST. ANDREWS,
_June 12, 1877_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE SOURCES OF POETRY 11
CHAPTER II.
THE POETIC FEELING AWAKENED BY THE WORLD OF NATURE 32
CHAPTER III.
POETIC AND SCIENTIFIC WONDER 46
CHAPTER IV.
WILL SCIENCE PUT OUT POETRY? 57
CHAPTER V.
HOW FAR SCIENCE MAY MODIFY POETRY 64
CHAPTER VI.
THE MYSTICAL SIDE OF NATURE 77
CHAPTER VII.
PRIMEVAL IMAGINATION WORKING ON NATURE—LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY 87
CHAPTER VIII.
SOME OF THE WAYS IN WHICH POETS DEAL WITH NATURE 102
CHAPTER IX.
NATURE IN HEBREW POETRY, AND IN HOMER 136
CHAPTER X.
NATURE IN LUCRETIUS AND VIRGIL 153
CHAPTER XI.
NATURE IN CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, AND MILTON 170
CHAPTER XII.
RETURN TO NATURE BEGUN BY ALLAN RAMSAY AND THOMSON 193
CHAPTER XIII.
NATURE IN COLLINS, GRAY, GOLDSMITH, COWPER, AND BURNS 205
CHAPTER XIV.
WORDSWORTH AS AN INTERPRETER OF NATURE 235
THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.
CHAPTER I.
THE SOURCES OF POETRY.
Poetry, we are often told, has two great objects with which it deals,
two substances out of which alone it weaves its many-colored fabric—Man
and Nature. Yet such a statement seems hardly adequate. For is there not
in all high Poetry, whether it deals with Nature or with Man, continual
reference, now latent, now expressed, to something which is beyond and
above both? This reference has taken many shapes, and uttered itself
in many ways, according to the belief and civilization of each age and
country. But by whatever mists and obstructions it has been colored and
refracted, it has never been wholly absent from true Poetry, and has
been working itself clearer, and making itself more powerfully felt, as
the world grows older. The Higher Life encompassing the life both of Man
and of Nature; the deeper Foundation on which both ultimately repose;
the omnipresent Power which binds both together, and makes them work in
unison toward some further end,—this has been a truth ever present in the
highest Poetry, to which great Poets have always witnessed. Therefore,
even in the most summary view of the domain of Poetry, we must not omit
this invisible but most powerful element. To express it clearly, we must
say that Poetry has three objects, which in varying degrees enter into
it,—Man, Nature, and God. The presence of this last pervades all great
Poetry, whether it lifts an eye of reverence directly towards Himself,
or whether the presence be only indirectly felt, as the centre to which
all deep thoughts about Man and Nature ultimately tend. Regarded in this
view, the field over which Poetry ranges becomes coextensive with the
domain of Philosophy, and indeed of Theology. Dissimilar, often opposed,
as is the procedure of Poetry, of Philosophy, and of Theology, different
as are the faculties which each calls into play, and the mode in which
these faculties deal with their objects, yet the hinges on which all
alike turn, the cardinal conceptions on which their eye is fixed, are
fundamentally the same. While Philosophy and Theology, in their striving
to attain distinct conceptions, are forced to deal with these great
ideas separately, and to keep them systematically apart, Poetry, on the
other hand, under the fusing and blending power of imagination, is, in
its highest mood, pervaded by a continual reference to all the three at
once, and will at times combine and flash them all at once upon the soul
in one inspired line.
It is, however, of only one of these three main objects of Poetry that
I now propose to treat—the action of Poetry on external Nature, the way
in which the poets deal with the outward world. In doing this it will
appear at a glance, and will become more clear in the sequel, that it
is impossible to isolate this one aspect of Poetry; that, even when the
poet’s regards are mainly turned toward the outward world, the sense
of God and of man is not far away. But even when we do our best to
limit the subject as far as may be, it is so vast in itself and in its
ramifications, that, far from hoping to exhaust it in these few pages,
I shall be well content if, when they are finished, it is found that a
few avenues of thought have been opened up, a few glimpses obtained into
truths which are real and suggestive.
Before going farther, let me say what I mean by Nature, for there is
no word which more needs definition. There is none, except perhaps its
counterpart, Reason, which is used in more various, often conflicting,
meanings, or with more shades of meaning, each passing into the other.
By Nature, then, I understand the whole sum of appearances which reach
us, which are made known to us, primarily through the senses. It includes
all the intimations we have through sense of that great entity which
lies outside of ourselves, but with which we have so much to do. For
my present purpose I do not include Man, either his body or his mind,
as part of Nature, but regard him rather as standing out from Nature,
and surveying and using that great external entity which encompasses and
confronts him at every turn, he being the contemplator, Nature the thing
contemplated.
The same external Nature which Poetry works on supplies the staple or
raw material with which all the Physical Sciences deal, and which they
endeavor to reduce to exact knowledge, subduing apparent confusion and
multiplicity into unity, law, and order. Each of the Physical Sciences
attempts to explain the outward world in one of its aspects, to interpret
it from one point of view. And the whole circle of the Physical Sciences,
or Physical Science in its widest extent, confines itself to explaining
the appearances of the material world by the properties of matter, and
to reducing what is complex and manifold to the operation of a few
simple but all-pervading laws. But besides those aspects of Nature which
Physical Science explains, over and above those laws which the Sciences
discover, there are other sides or aspects of Nature which come to us
through other than scientific avenues, and which, when they do reach us,
bring home to us new truth, and raise us to noble contemplations. This
ordered array of material appearances, these marshaled lines of Nature’s
sequences, wonderful and beautiful though they be, are not in themselves
all. No reasonable being can rest in them. Inevitably he is carried out
of and beyond these, to other inquiries which no Physics can answer:
How stand these phenomena to the thinking mind and feeling heart which
contemplates them? how came they to be as they are? are they there of
themselves, or is there a Higher Centre from which they proceed? what is
their origin? what the goal toward which they travel? Inquiries such as
these, which are the genuine product of Reason, lead us for their answer,
not to the Physics of the Universe, but to another order of thought,
to Poetry, to Philosophy, and to Theology. And the light thrown from
these regions on this marvelous outward framework, while it contradicts
nothing in the body of truth which Science has made good, permeates the
whole with a higher meaning, and transfigures it with a splendor which is
Divine.
Philosophy and Theology we must for the present leave alone, and ask
only what is that aspect of Nature, that truth of the External World,
with which Poetry has more immediately to do. To put it in the simplest
way: it is Beauty, that strange and wonderful entity with which all
creation is clothed as with a garment, or rather I should say pervaded
and penetrated as by a subtle essence, inwrought into its inmost fibre.
The Poet is the man to whom is given the eye that sees this more
instinctively, the heart that feels it more intensely, than other
men do; and who has the power to express it and bring it home to his
fellow-men. But if I were to confine myself to this I should not be
saying much. For the question would at once be asked, “Pray, what is
Beauty?” And it might be further asked, “Is it not as much the business
of the Painter as of the Poet to seize and express the visible beauty of
which you speak?”
Any attempt to answer the first question, and to explain what is Beauty,
would involve a long discussion, perhaps not a very profitable one. At
any rate it would lead me far from my present purpose. This only may be
said in passing. Light, as physicists inform us, is not something which
exists in itself apart from any sentient being. The external reality
is not light, but the motion of certain particles, which, when they
impinge on the eye, and have been conveyed along the visual nerve to the
brain, are felt by the mind as light,—result in the perception of light.
Light, therefore, is not a purely objective thing, but is something
produced by the meeting of certain outward motions with a perceiving
mind. Again, certain vibrations of the air striking on the drum of the
ear, and communicated by the nerve of hearing to the brain, result in
the perception of sound. Sound, therefore, is not a purely objective
entity, but is a result that requires to its production the meeting of
an outward vibration with a hearing mind; it is the result of the joint
action of these two elements. In a similar way, certain qualities of
outward objects, certain combinations of laws in the material world, when
apprehended by the soul through its æsthetic and imaginative faculties,
result in the perception of what we call Beauty. Therefore Beauty,
neither wholly without us nor wholly within us, is a product resulting
from the meeting of certain qualities of the outward world with a
sensitive and imaginative soul. The combination of both of these elements
is requisite to its existence. It is no merely mental or subjective
thing, born of association, and depending on individual caprice, as the
Scotch philosophers so long fancied. When the two elements necessary
to the perception of it have met, it is a reality as inevitable and as
veritable as the law of gravitation, or any law which science registers.
And when, either through our own perception, or through the teaching of
the poets, we learn to apprehend it—when it has found entrance into us,
through eye and ear, imagination and emotion, we have learnt something
more about the world in which we dwell than Physics have taught us,—a new
truth of the material universe has reached us through the imagination,
not through the scientific or logical faculty.
If, then, Beauty be a real quality interwoven into the essential texture
of Creation, and if Poetry be the fittest human expression of the
existence of this quality, it follows that Poetry has to do with truth
as really as Science has, though with a different order of truth. This
is perhaps not the common view of the matter. An old Scotch gentleman I
once knew, one of the most sagacious and wise of his generation, who,
whenever anything was propounded which was more than usually extravagant
and absurd, used to dismiss it with a wave of his hand, saying: “Oh, that
is Poetry.” Yet he was one who could see in the outlines of his native
hills, and feel in all human relations, whatever was most beautiful.
There are, I dare say, a good many sensible people who share my friend’s
view, to whom Poetry is only another name for what is fanciful,
fantastic, unreal—only, as one called it, a convenient way of talking
nonsense. To these I would say, If this be so, if Poetry be not true, if
it have not a real foundation in the nature of things, if genuine Poetry
be not as true a form of thinking as any other, indeed one of the highest
forms of human thought, then I should not recommend any one to waste time
on it, but to have done with it, and turn to more solid pursuits. It is
because I have a quite opposite conviction, because I believe Poetry to
have a true and noble place in this order of things, a place not made by
the conceit of man, but intended by the Maker of this order, because I
hold Poetry to be, what Wordsworth has called it, “the breath and finer
spirit of all knowledge”—to be “immortal as the heart of man,” it is
because of these convictions that there is claimed for it the serious
regard of reasonable men, and that it seems worth our while to dwell for
a little on one, though only one, aspect of this many-sided study.
The real nature and intrinsic truth of Poetry will be made more apparent,
if we may turn aside for a moment to reflect on the essence of that
state of mind which we call the poetic, the genesis of that creation
which we call Poetry. Whenever any object of sense, or spectacle of the
outer world, any truth of reason, or event of past history, any fact of
human experience, any moral or spiritual reality; whenever, in short,
any fact or object which the sense, or the intellect, or the soul, or
the spirit of man can apprehend, comes home to one so as to touch him to
the quick, to pierce him with a more than usual vividness and sense of
reality, then is awakened that stirring of the imagination, that glow
of emotion, in which Poetry is born. There is no truth cognizable by
man which may not shape itself into Poetry. It matters not whether it
be a vision of Nature’s ongoings, or a conception of the understanding,
or some human incident, or some truth of the affections, or some moral
sentiment, or some glimpse into the spiritual world; any one of these
may be so realized as to become fit subjects for poetic utterance. Only
in order that it should be so, it is necessary that the object, whatever
it is, should cease to be a merely sensible object, or a mere notion
of the understanding, and pass inward,—pass out of the coldness of
the merely notional region into the warm atmosphere of the life-giving
Imagination. Vitalized there, the truth shapes itself into living
images which kindle the passion and affections, and stimulate the whole
man. This is what has been called the real apprehension of truths, as
opposed to the merely notional assent to them. There is no quality in
which men more differ than in this intensity of mental nature, this
power of vividly realizing whatever a man does lay hold of. It is an
essential—indeed a primary—ingredient in the composition of the Poet;
but is not confined to him. It is shared by all men who are powerful in
any line of thought or action. This mental energy, this intensity of
realizing power, is the stuff out of which are made all who in any way
really move their fellow-men. It creates, as has been well said, “Heroes
and saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers, and reformers, the
pioneers of discovery in science, visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants,
and adventurers.” In these and such like, the men of abounding energy,
who have revolutionized states and moved the world, the process had begun
with the vivid realization of some truth through the imagination; but
it has not stopped there. It has gone on from the imagination to the
affections. It has stirred the hopes, the fears, the loves, the hates of
the soul, enkindling them and driving them with full force on the will,
and propelling the man into action. In the Poet, on the other hand, the
process not only begins, but continues in the imagination, kindling,
no doubt, a real glow of emotion, but not leading him, as poet, to any
outward action, save the one action of giving vent to what he feels, of
finding poetic expression for the vision with which his imagination is
filled.
In this we see the distinction between the Poet and those other men of
intense soul, who share with him the power of vivid apprehension, of
making real through the imagination whatever truths they see at all.
They carry that truth which they have imaginatively apprehended into
the region of the passions and the will, and rest not till they have
condensed it into outward action. He keeps the truths which he sees
within the confines of imagination, and is impelled by his peculiar
nature to seek a vehicle for it, not in action but in song, or in some
other form of artistic expression. And hence the practical danger which
besets the Poet, and indeed all æsthetic and literary men, of becoming
unreal, if that truth which they see and cultivate for artistic purposes
they never try to embody in any form of practical action, any common
purpose with their fellow-men.
If then it be asked what are the proper objects of Poetry, what is the
proper field for the exercise of the Poet’s art, the answer, supposing
what I have said to be true, is, the whole range of existence; wherever
the sensations, thoughts, feelings of man can travel, there the Poet may
be at his side, and find material for his faculties to work on. The one
condition of his working is, that the object pass out of the region of
mere dry fact, or abstract notion, into the warm and breathing realm of
imagination. What the mental process is by which objects cease to be mere
dead facts, informations, and become imaged into living realities, I stay
not to inquire. The whole philosophy of Imagination is a subject on which
the metaphysicians have as yet said little that is helpful.
With regard to the working of Imagination and other so-called faculties,
Philosophers, I rather think, have cut and carved our mental nature with
too keen a knife. They have “murdered to dissect.” Our books lay it down,
for instance, as an axiom, that a definite act of the pure understanding
must needs precede every movement of the affections, that we must form
a distinct conception of a thing as pleasant before we can desire it,
that we must first judge a character to be noble, before admiration of
it can be awakened. I am not sure that this is the true account of the
matter, am not convinced that the understanding unmixed with feeling, the
pure intelligence untouched by sentiment, must first decide before the
affections can be moved. Is it so clear that in all cases we can separate
knowledge from affection? Is there not a large field of truth—namely,
moral truths, in which we cannot do so—into which the affections must
actively enter before any judgment can be formed? For, as has been
said,[1] “The affections themselves are a kind of understanding; we
cannot understand without them. Affection is a part of insight; it is
required to understand the facts of the case. The moral affections, _e.
g._, are the very instruments by which we intellectually apprehend good
and high human character. All admiration is affection—the admiration of
virtue, the admiration of nature. Affection itself then is a kind of
intelligence, and we cannot separate the feeling in our nature from the
reason. Feeling is necessary for comprehension, and we cannot know what
embrace particular instance of goodness is, we cannot embrace the true
conception of goodness in general, without it.”
If this be true of moral apprehension, if in this intelligence and
affection are so coincident, so interpenetrate each other, that we cannot
say which is first, which last, where the one ends, the other begins,
the same truth holds good in imaginative apprehension. Here, too, there
is not first a cut-and-dry intellectual act, and then a succeeding
emotion. From the first, in every act of the imagination, these two
elements are present simultaneously; though it is true that in time the
emotional element tends to grow stronger than the intellectual, sometimes
even overpowers it. Imagination in its essence seems to be, from the
first, intellect and feeling blended and interpenetrating each other.
Thus it would seem that purely intellectual acts belong to the surface
and outside of our nature,—as you pass onward to the depths, the more
vital places of the soul, the intellectual, the emotional, and the moral
elements are all equally at work,—and this in virtue of their greater
reality, their more essential truth, their nearer contact with the centre
of things. To this region belong all acts of high imagination—the region
intermediate between pure understanding and moral affection, partaking of
both elements, looking equally both ways.
But it is not with the philosophy of the process, but with the results
that we have now to do. All men possess this power of vitalizing
knowledge in some measure. The mental qualities which go to make the
Poet have nothing exclusive or exceptional in them. They differ nothing
in kind from those of other men—only in degree. As one well entitled to
speak for the Poets has told us,—the Poet, the man of vivid soul shares
the same interests, sympathies, feelings as other men, only he has them
more intensely. “He is distinguished from other men, not by any peculiar
gifts, but by greater promptness and intensity in thinking and feeling
those things which other men think and feel, and by a greater power of
expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him.”[2]
I have said that the range of Poetry is boundless as the universe.
Whenever the soul comes into living contact with fact and truth, whenever
it realizes these with more than common vividness, there arises a thrill
of joy, a glow of emotion. And the expression of that thrill, that
glow, is Poetry. The range of poetic emotion may thus be as wide as the
range of human thought, as existence. It does not follow from this that
all objects are alike fit to awaken poetry. The nobler the objects the
nobler will be the poetry they awaken, when they fall on the heart of
a true poet. But though this be so, yet poetry may be found springing
up in the most unlikely places, among what seem the driest efforts
of human thought, just as you may see the intense blue of the Alpine
forget-me-not[3] lighting up the darkest crevices, or the most bare and
inaccessible ledges of the mountain precipice.
In illustration of this, let me give an anecdote which I lately read in
one of Canon Liddon’s sermons in St. Paul’s:—“Why do you sit up so late
at night?” was a question put to an eminent mathematician. “To enjoy
myself,” was the reply. “But how can that be? I thought you spent your
time in working out problems.” “So I do, and that is my enjoyment,”
answered the mathematician. “Depend upon it,” he added, “those lose a
form of enjoyment too keen and sweet to be described, who do not know,
after long effort, what is the joy of recognizing the agreement between
two mathematical formulæ.” If, in such moments of profound satisfaction,
our mathematician had added to his other powers the power adequately to
utter the joy of his “eureka,” the expression of it would, no doubt,
have been a high poem. “Poetry is the blossom and fragrancy of all human
knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language,”[4] or it
is the fine wine that is served at the banquet of human life. And what is
true of mathematical is still more true of other forms of truth. Whenever
a soul comes into vivid contact with it, there springs up that emotion
which is the essence of Poetry. And that this contact is so delightful,
that all truth and the human soul are so akin, that when they recognize
each other, the immediate result is this thrill of joy, this pure and
high emotion, what does not this fact hint of the nature of the soul and
its origin?
We now then say that as Physical Science explains the appearances of
the material world solely by the properties of matter, and it is its
business to do so, so Poetry seizes the relation of outward objects to
the soul and expresses this, and it is its business to do so. Physical
Science deals with the outward object alone. Poetry has to do with the
object _plus_ the soul of man. Or, to put it otherwise: from the meeting
and combined action of these two forces, the outward object and the
soul, there arises a creation, or emanation, different from either, but
partaking of the nature of both. And it is the business of true poetry
to express this. Any real object, vividly apprehended, we thus see, will
awaken in an intelligent and emotional being a response which is the
beginning of poetry. The depth and breadth and volume of that response
will, of course, be proportioned to the nobility of the object which
evokes it, and to the responsive capacity of the mind to which it makes
its appeal. And if it be asked, How are we to estimate the nobility of
any object? we may say that its measure will be the variety and strength
and elevation of the emotions which it has the power of evoking in those
spirits which are most finely touched. The deeper, the larger, the higher
the object presented to a soul fitted to receive it, the greater will be
the body of emotion with which that soul will respond to it, the finer
will be the poetry which is the expression of that emotion.
All delight we know on earth arises, as the wise Bishop Butler has told
us, “from a faculty having its proper object,” and the perfection of
happiness would consist “in all the faculties having found their full
and adequate object.” If then those partial objects, those shadows of
perfection, which are the highest objects vouchsafed to us here, awaken
in us a keen responsive thrill of emotion, whose fittest utterance is
song, what shall it be for a human soul to be admitted to the vision of
Him “who alone is an object, an infinitely more than adequate object to
our most exalted faculties—an adequate supply to all the capacities of
our souls, a subject to the understanding, an object to the affections.”
In the contemplation of this truth long pondered, the deep heart of the
philosophic Bishop breaks forth into a strain of meditation in which the
conflict between intense feeling and his habitual self-restraint seems
almost to overpower him. And what a view does this give of the essential
permanence of Poetry, how in the essence it must be eternal as the soul
of man! It seems to open a glimpse into the meaning of the mysterious
imagery of the Apocalypse, and to hint how it will be that the joy of the
Redeemed before the Throne can utter itself only in that new song which
none can learn but they.
* * * * *
Thus far I have spoken only of the feeling or emotion which generates
Poetry. Little or nothing has been said of that other side—the expression
of the feeling in words. The mathematician of whom I have spoken was
not, for all his joy, a poet. Why? Because though he had the material of
poetry within him in the intense joy, he had not the power of putting
it forth, of making it audible. He kept all the delight to himself, and
could not by utterance impart it to others. He was at best but a dumb
poet—a poet “in posse,” not a poet “in esse,” as the Schoolmen speak.
And the question arises, Is not a dumb Poet a contradiction in terms? is
it not of the very essence of a poet that he should be vocal? Is it not
in this, his power of voicing his emotion, rather than in his power of
feeling it, that he is distinguished from common men? Here we come on a
great controversy on which I shall not venture to dogmatize. Wordsworth,
we all remember, held that
“Many are the poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine;
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.”
But Goethe and many others with him hold that without the power of poetic
expression there can be no poet; that as well might you speak of a
child being born which was a mind without a body, as of poetry existing
in the soul which does not embody itself in language; that, if we are
to divide Poetry into essence and expression, the garment of musical
words is indeed the more essential of the two—or rather, that Poetry
is non-existent till it has clothed itself in words; that in the true
poet the emotion and the expression of it come into being at once, and
are one. To this side Coleridge, I believe, would lean, for we find him
saying—“The sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is
a gift of imagination, and ... may be cultivated and improved, but can
never be learned.”
On the whole, then, without deciding whether the essence of the poetic
nature lies in the capacity of feeling the emotion, and brooding over the
shaping thought, or in the power of projecting it in words, this may be
said:—Even if the potential poet may be silent, the actual poet must add
the power of embodying his emotion in melodious words. And this from no
conventional artifice of literature; but because, before the existence of
any literature, the natural expression of strong emotion is a chant, a
song. There is an essential kinship between the waves of excited feeling
within the breast, the heaving of the soul under the power of emotion,
and a corresponding rhythmical cadence in the words which utter it. Song
or chant and emotion are as intrinsically allied as word and thought.
The poet is the man whose emotions, intenser than those of other men,
naturally find a vent for themselves in some form of harmonious words,
whether this be the form of metre or of balanced and musical prose. The
rhythmical vibrations of his soul long to project themselves into some
sonorous medium. And for poetry to lie as it does dead in our printed
books, to be read merely by the eye, or, if uttered aloud, to be read as
one would a newspaper, is as unnatural, as emptying to it of its meaning,
as it is for the lovely wild-flower to be seen dried and colorless within
the leaves of a herbarium. Not of lyrical poetry only, though of it
preëminently, but of all high poetry, may it be said, that it is only
then fitly uttered when it is chanted, not read, and so it is with a
chant that most poets have recited their own poetry. As Wordsworth tells
us, “Though the accompaniment of a musical instrument be dispensed with,
the true poet does not therefore abandon his privilege distinct from that
of the mere proseman;
“He murmurs near the running brooks,
A music sweeter than their own.”
It is a sad divorce that has long been made between poetry and song. We
shall never know the full power of Poetry till she has wandered back to
her original home, and found there her long-severed sister, Music. Only
then, if they could find each other again, and come forth to the world in
blended might, should we know the full compass of that marvelous creation
which we call Poetry.