I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you children!
No; precisely what makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot explain
any more than we can describe a perfume. There is a little quatrain of
Gongora's quoted by Calderon in his "Alcalde of Zalamea" which has an
inexplicable charm for me:
Las flores del romero,
Niña Isabel,
Hoy son flores azules,
Y mañana serán miel.
If I translate it, 't is nonsense, yet I understand it perfectly, and it
will, I dare say, outlive much wiser things in my memory. It is the very
function of poetry to free us from that witch's circle of common sense
which holds us fast in its narrow enchantment. In this disenthralment,
language and verse have their share, and we may say that language also
is capable of a certain idealization. Here is a passage from the XXXth
song of Drayton's "Poly-Olbion":
Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every Hill
Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring valleys fill;
Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
From whose stone-trophied head, it on to Wendrosse went,
Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent,
That Broadwater therewith within her banks astound,
In sailing to the sea, told it in Egremound.
This gave a hint to Wordsworth, who, in one of his "Poems on the Naming
of Places," thus prolongs the echo of it:
Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again;
The ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar,
And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth
A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
Carried the Lady's voice,--old Skiddaw blew
His speaking-trumpet;--back out of the clouds
Of Glaramara southward came the voice;
And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.
Now, this passage of Wordsworth I should call the
idealization of that of Drayton, who becomes poetical
only in the "stone-trophied head of Dunbalrase";
and yet the thought of both poets is the same.
Even what is essentially vulgar may be idealized by seizing and dwelling
on the generic characteristics. In "Antony and Cleopatra" Shakespeare
makes Lepidus tipsy, and nothing can be droller than the drunken gravity
with which he persists in proving himself capable of bearing his part in
the conversation. We seem to feel the whirl in his head when we find his
mind revolving round a certain fixed point to which he clings as to a
post. Antony is telling stories of Egypt to Octavius, and Lepidus, drawn
into an eddy of the talk, interrupts him:
_Lepidus_: You gave strange serpents there.
_Antony_ [_trying to shake him off_]: Ay, Lepidus.
_Lepidus_: Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud
by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.
_Antony_ [_thinking to get rid of him_]: They are so.
Presently Lepidus has revolved again, and continues, as if he had been
contradicted:
Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies' pyramises
are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard
that.
And then, after another pause, still intent on proving himself sober, he
asks, coming round to the crocodile again:
What manner o' thing is your crocodile?
Antony answers gravely:
It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath
breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own
organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements
once out of it, it transmigrates.
_Lepidus_: What color is it of?
_Antony_: Of its own color, too.
_Lepidus_ [_meditatively_]: 'T is a strange serpent.
The ideal in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades
embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the
dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic
sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though
these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this
that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was
supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and
something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg
encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown," whereas
the imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to the
mind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to this
was a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, and
personification with that typical expression which is the true function
of poetry. Compare, for example, Collins's Revenge with Chaucer's.
Revenge impatient rose;
He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
And, with a withering look,
The war-denouncing trumpet took,
And blew a blast so loud and dread,
Were ne'er prophetic sound so full of woe!
And ever and anon he beat
The doubling drum with furious heat.
"Words, words, Horatio!" Now let us hear Chaucer with his single
stealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard the
murderous tread behind us:
The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.
Which is the more terrible? Which has more danger in it--Collins's noise
or Chaucer's silence? Here is not the mere difference, you will
perceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffuseness
which distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention.
Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy as
the two points most apt to impress the imagination.
The imagination, as concerns expression, condenses; the fancy, on the
other hand, adorns, illustrates, and commonly amplifies. The one is
suggestive, the other picturesque. In Chapman's "Hero and Leander," I
read--
Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes,
And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies
How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine,
For her love's sake, that with immortal wine
Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's-ease
Than there was water in the Sestian seas.
In the epithet "star," Hero's thought implies the beauty and brightness
of her lover and his being the lord of her destiny, while in "Neptune's
skies" we have not only the simple fact that the waters are the
atmosphere of the sea-god's realm, but are reminded of that reflected
heaven which Hero must have so often watched as it deepened below her
tower in the smooth Hellespont. I call this as high an example of fancy
as could well be found; it is picture and sentiment combined--the very
essence of the picturesque.
But when Keats calls Mercury "the star of Lethe," the word "star" makes
us see him as the poor ghosts do who are awaiting his convoy, while the
word "Lethe" intensifies our sympathy by making us feel his coming as
they do who are longing to drink of forgetfulness. And this again reacts
upon the word "star," which, as it before expressed only the shining of
the god, acquires a metaphysical significance from our habitual
association of star with the notions of hope and promise. Again nothing
can be more fanciful than this bit of Henry More the Platonist:
What doth move
The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?
The thrush or lark that, mounting high above,
Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn
Heavily hanging in the dewy morn?
But compare this with Keats again:
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown;
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
The imagination has touched that word "alien," and we see the field
through Ruth's eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes, not
merely through those of the poet.