consider a sonnet with particular gusto; a grave digression, surely?
I think not. You shall not judge a poem's right to the epic name by
its length. This little sonnet is an epic too, with Milton on Pegasus
for hero; and A. S., Rutherford, Edwards, and What-d'ye-call for
four-headed Chimaera. I think the very archaeus of the epic is the
eternal battle of the world; and that all epics have their root in
that, and are great and regal in proportion to their nearness, inwardly
and spiritually speaking, to it. Tennyson knew it when he set out to
write in his _Idylls of the King_ a record of the Soul at war with
sense; only perhaps he knew it too personally and consciously; and lost
the grand epic symbolism in his quest after actual _criticism_ of life.
II
But to return to _The Princess_. Here, the objective is not to set
forth eternal verity, but to discuss, perhaps throw light on, a problem
of our own day; a social, in a sense, rather than a spiritual problem.
What figure can stand for the battling soul, and what for the principle
of evil? There are epic places in the _Idylls of the King_, where this
symbolism stands forth majestically, and style and glory correspond. We
have the story of that "last, dim battle in the west" and the passing
of Arthur thereafter; clean, antique, touched with the infinite and
with eternity; therein, if you will, is the epic atmosphere. But here
it is the benevolent, thoughtful Tennyson that is speaking, troubled
by the evils that he sees around him; not Tennyson the great Bard on
fire with ultimate and secret truth. You see, there was the duality
there; and both sides of it are honorable, to be revered and loved.
If criticism has a work to perform in discriminating between the two,
she does no dishonor to the thinker in separating him from the poet.
We have to ask what there is in this work, _The Princess_, that might
entitle it to be considered poetry, in the highest sense.
The style? Style is there, undoubtedly. Every line has been molded,
heightened, shaped, polished, chiseled. But let us compare it with the
style of poetry, and we shall see the difference. Here is one of the
most fiery passages; one in which you can feel that the invitation was
to the supreme, super-personal compassion to enter in:
"O brother, you have known the pangs we felt,
What heats of indignation when we heard
Of those that iron-cramp'd their women's feet;
Of lands in which at the altar the poor bride
Gives her harsh groom for bridal-gift a scourge;
Of living hearts that crack within the fire
Where smoulder their dead despots; and of those--
Mothers--that, all prophetic pity, fling
Their pretty maids in the running flood, and swoops
The vulture, beak and talon, at the heart
Made for all noble motion; and I saw
That equal baseness lived in sleeker times
With smoother men: the old leaven leaven'd all:
Millions of throats would bawl for civil rights,
No woman named: therefore I set my face
Against all men, and lived but for mine own.
Far from all men I built a fold for them."
So speaks the princess of the story; profusely, if with great dignity;
bitterly, but argumentatively: it is a heightened, an exalted prose
style; but it has not taken that leap into infinity which is the mark
of the poetic grand manner. For a contrast, consider this; the work of
another Victorian bard; one not greater than Tennyson, but here with
his poet's blue mantle upon him, robed with the infinite. He, too, is
smitten with compassion for certain women; and the flame leaps up from
the blow in this wise:
Here, down between the dusty trees,
At this lank edge of haggard wood,
Women with labour-loosened knees,
With gaunt backs bowed by servitude,
Stop, shift their loads, and pray, and fare
Forth with souls easier for the prayer.
* * * * *
God of this grievous people, wrought
After the likeness of their race,
By faces like thine own besought,
Thine own blind helpless eyeless face,
I too, that have nor tongue nor knee
For prayer, I have a word to thee.
It was for this then, that thy speech
Was blown about the world in flame,
And men's souls shot up out of reach
Of fear or lust or thwarting shame--
That thy faith over souls should pass
As sea-winds burning the young grass?
It was for this, that prayers like these
Should spend themselves about thy feet.
And with hard overlaboured knees
Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons,
And fruitless as their orisons?
It is the first and the last verses quoted that count; and I think much
might be learned from a careful comparison of them with the passage
from _The Princess_. Tennyson has made a catalog, in the manner of
prose, of the sorrows of women; his mind traveling with passion,
but with a certain artistic, conscious discrimination, from China,
India, Arabia, to the hustings of Victorian England (for it is that,
in reality). The style of prose we say; well, the style of rhetoric:
picture by picture has been chosen with a view to make the case strong,
to impress who should hear it. "Ida's answer ... Oration-like," says
Tennyson, knowing well what he was writing. Swinburne, in the supreme
manner of poetry, has burned upon our vision that solemn, terrible
picture, bare, unornate, unforgetable, of the women at the wayside
crucifix; "slaves of men" beating "bosoms too lean to suckle sons":
and with the picture there is that impression of augustness, that
sense as of the presence of a great avenging angel, or perhaps, of
the majesty of the Law. The attitude of the Princess Ida towards the
evils that she condemns, is one of personal protest; she dwells on the
same plane as they do, albeit in the brighter regions of it; she is a
human personality, and speaks with a human and quite personal voice.
But the anger of Swinburne here, the condemnation that he deals out,
is not personal: the words are such as might be spoken by a god from
his throne. They come from a loftier place than the thing condemned
occupies, as though they were a sentence passed from the tribunal
against whose decrees there is no appeal. So they are indeed. For this
is Poetry, which is the voice of the Soul; and the Soul is deific,
sovereign, aloof; and it does look down and pass sentence on the things
of this world--a sentence damnatory or compassionate, but based on
the evidence of direct vision and certitude, never on argument and the
weighing up of pros and cons.
Look at those last lines again; with what sure intensity the
whole tragedy is revealed! Compassion, in her own manner loftily
_disdainful_, we might almost say, is suddenly focused; nine-tenths
of the story are left untold, but the one-tenth that remains has the
whole cry, the whole tragedy in it of a world blighted by lies: it is
"dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn," and, _mirabile
dictu_, with the "love of love," or compassion, in a breath.
We get that same strange glorious blending of compassion and
scorn--pride or scorn, one does not know what to call it; it is
neither of those things in reality, but rather the native accent
of divinity in the voice of the soul--we hear that same majestic
blending of compassion and haughtiness pre-eminently in a line from
the _Purgatorio_ which Arnold justly gives as one of the most perfect
examples of the Grand Manner of poetry, the highest style than can be
impressed on written or chanted words; the line: _Che drizza voi che il
mondo fece torti_, "Which straightens you whom the world made crooked."
We see here, I think, as in the passage from Swinburne, the same
impatience of words and details; the same godlike aloofness; the same
pity too compressed, too burning and intense, to reveal itself fully
or tenderly: the feeling has passed beyond the limits of the power of
tenderness, we might say, to be tender: it is such a super-passional
passion of tenderness, suppressed, governed, boiling, that it must be
stern, swift, momentary--or nothing. Is it not the very naked voice
of the august divinity hidden within us?--the greatest fashion that
can be burned and infused into the brute stuff of language; because
ringing with the dominance of that hidden Master? It bears the mark of
compassion, because compassion is the inevitable attitude of the soul
outward from itself; and it bears the stamp of sublime titanism--that
thing that would be scorn, were it bitter and hostile, and that would
be mere majesty, might it remain passive and in repose--because the
soul is a god, and knows itself to be a god, and breathes out the
atmosphere of godhood. Here it is in Milton, again:
His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined:
and of course, it is Milton and Dante who are the supreme masters in
modern literature of the Grand Manner; as poets, the greatest of the
poets.
[Illustration: Copyright by Katherine Tingley, 1911 Lomaland Photo. and
Engraving Dept. PHEIDIAS, EURIPIDES, AND ARISTON GROUP IN "THE AROMA OF
ATHENS"]
[Illustration: Copyright by Katherine Tingley, 1911 Lomaland Photo. and
Engraving Dept. KRITON, THUKYDIDES, PHEIDIAS, ARISTON, AND HIPPONIKOS
(READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT) "THE AROMA OF ATHENS"]
[Illustration: Copyright by Katherine Tingley, 1911 Lomaland Photo. and
Engraving Dept. HIPPARETE, PERIKTIONE, POTONE, ASPASIA, AGATHOKLEIA,
DIOTIMA, DEINOMACHE, AND MYRTO (READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT) "THE AROMA
OF ATHENS"]
[Illustration: Copyright by Katherine Tingley, 1911 Lomaland Photo. and
Engraving Dept. DIOTIMA, PERIKLES, AND ASPASIA, SEATED "THE AROMA OF
ATHENS"]
Now it will be said that there is compassion in the passage quoted from
_The Princess_; and undoubtedly there is; but is not the effort all to
manifest it, to make it plain to every one that it is there, to lead it
from picture to picture that will feed and excite it? We may say that
it is a voice from below upward, an inspiration; it has the style and
atmosphere of a great endeavor of the personal self towards the soul:
whereas in the other cases, it is the comment and utterance of the soul
itself. _There_, there is no effort to manifest compassion; the effort
is all to suppress and control it. The effort is like the metal walls
of a bomb, without which the explosive would only fizzle and waste.
The poet--Swinburne, Milton, or Dante--had no doubt of his dynamite;
it was too mighty, too awesome a thing; all he must do is to make the
bomb walls strong, strong, strong. So, in reading, we get the effect,
and are blown up--to the altitudes of consciousness. Tennyson, being
also a poet, and therefore knowing the nature of dynamite; but writing
here, not poetry, but mere criticism of life in the guise of poetry,
puts what he can, out of his memory, of dynamite into his work: infuses
what he may of the atmosphere of compassion into it. Swinburne and
Dante and Milton have a Niagara to deal with, and they must make the
channel of it as small as they may; they must dam it as well as they
can, or heaven knows where they and the world would be swept to--mere
incoherence and blind fury perhaps, or silence. Tennyson (in this case)
has to deal with an irrigation scheme, and must make his channels as
wide and deep as he can, and coax the waters of the world into them.
Then, too, see how he deals with that other quality. He knew well
enough that it is integral in the Grand Manner of Poetry, and he will
weave it in here, if he may. So we have:
Far from all men I built a fold for them:
* * * * *
And prospered; till a _rout of saucy boys
Brake on us at our books_.
There is no doubt what quality that is; scorn, indignation,
separateness, bitterness, hostility. It is a personal imitation of
loftiness, the compassionate element has quite vanished from it; there
is all the difference in the world between it and the fierce pity of--
these slaves of men should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons,
And fruitless as their orisons:
or the sudden stern mercy implied in--
la Montagna
Che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti:
or the serene, august luminance of compassion shining through--
His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness.
Or, since the compassion is out of it, we might compare it with those
many lines from Milton that convey only the sense of the grandeur,
without the compassion, of the soul; lines such as these:
An old and haughty nation, proud in arms;
or:
Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, _unchanged_
To hoarse or mute, _though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round_;
or:
Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench
Of that forgetful lake benumb not still,
_That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat; descent and fall
To us are adverse_:
--these speak of the majesty of the soul; but the other only of the
bitterness of the personality.
But you will say, Tennyson was putting words into the mouth of a very
human, limited personality; and so the piece is more artistic as it is,
and would be inappropriate otherwise. These are the words she actually
would have said. True. The personality does speak in prose. Prose is
the language of personality; and no doubt it was first invented when
first the souls rayed out personalities from themselves; no doubt
poetry is the older, as it is the more august. So the style used in
_The Princess_ is suitable, well-chosen, artistic; it fits the subject
admirably; which proves that the subject is essentially a prose one.
For prose--history, philosophy, criticism--examines and criticises life
from without; but poetry illumines it from within. Prose considers and
passes judgment on the external, the seeming, the current: Poetry
dwells within the holy of holies and her whole burden is the story of
the Soul.
If she looks outward at all--and she does that too, at times--it is
from her own standpoint, and in the eternal manner. She does not then
criticise; her tones do not mince nor falter. The bardic schools had a
law, that the office of the Bard was solely to extol what was noble;
there were other orders, not sacred like the bardic, whose business was
to satirize or to amuse. One can see that such a law must have come
from a time when that one force which, as was said above, alone can
move poetry to anger absolute, was not in evidence: for, except that
they must fight that force, that old law holds for the bards now. So
poetry, looking down into this world, criticises no one and nothing.
She exalts whom she will; she mantles humanity with godhood: and whom
she will--the antihumanists, the plotters against the freedom and
beauty of the soul--she thunders upon.
Swinburne, looking at the roadside crucifix ghastly in its deification
of decay and death, criticises _that_--nay, scourges the idea it
symbolizes, the soul-fettering dogmatism; pours on it the hate of hate,
the scorn of scorn, if you like--but it is because the awful vision of
the real Crucified burns up before him; the tragedy of the ages, the
enslaved, thwarted, hindered, persecuted _Soul of Man_. Dante beholds
the severe mercy of the Great Law, "that straightens us, whom the
world has made crooked." Milton, vainly endeavoring to be orthodox,
to write within the limits of the dogmas, justifying the ways of his
strange deity, and holding up Satan for our abhorrence, gives way to
the great spirit of the Poet within him time and again; and shows, time
and again, the sublime pathos of the Soul, Unchanged, though fallen on
evil days. Nay, but they do not tell of these things; they make them
live; they are revelations shown before us; so that our own eyes have
seen, and the universe has undergone transfiguration, and ourselves.
For Poetry is no little thing, no mere refinement. It is magic; it is
the life of the Gods; it is the secret and spiritual nature of things.
Without it, this Universe like a rotten bough, would break off from
the Tree of Life. Without it, there would be no Tree of Life. It is
the living sap, the greenness, the subtle vigor, and the beauty of the
Tree.
"THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES":
by H. Coryn, M. D., M. R. C. S.
Hegel, commenting upon the Pythagorean doctrine of number as the basis
of all things says:
Numbers have been much used as the expression of ideas. This, on one
side, has a look of depth. For, that another meaning is implied in
them than they immediately present, is seen at once; but how much is
implied in them is known neither to him who proposes, nor by him who
tries to understand.... The more obscure the thoughts, the deeper they
seem; the thing is, that what is most essential, but also what is
hardest, namely, the expression of one's self in definite notions--is
precisely what the proposer spares himself.
Upon which Stirling remarks:
But the curious point is that Hegel himself adopts this very numerical
symbolism, so far as it suits _the system_! It is only, indeed, when
that agreement fails, that the agreement of Hegel fails also. The
moment it does fail, however, his impatience breaks out. The one, the
two, the three, he contentedly, even warmly and admiringly accepts,
nay, "as far as five," he says, "there may well be something like
a thought in numbers, _but_ on from six there are simply arbitrary
determinations!"
Especially, said Hegel, there is meaning in _three_, the Trinity. The
Trinity is only unintelligible when considered as three separate units;
its divine meaning appears when we take it as a whole.
It would be a strange thing if there were no sense in what for two
thousand years has been the holiest Christian idea.
It would be stranger if one of the profoundest thinkers that ever
lived, a teacher whose grandeur of character made him almost an object
of worship to his pupils, had selected his symbols to "spare himself"
the labor of clear conception (or had let them conceal from himself the
confusion of his own thought). According to Hegel we must respectfully
see philosophy in the Christian Trinity; in the Pythagorean Dekad, none.
Pythagoras wrote nothing. And his teaching was esoteric, delivered
under pledge of secrecy. The essence of the echoes that reach us
amounts to this: that numbers and ratio are the soul of things; that
the soul itself is a number and a harmony.
Is there any possible reading of this from which it might appear
profoundly true and illuminating?
We sometimes estimate savage intelligence by the power of counting,
of adding units. From one point of view the power does not seem to go
very far with ourselves. We cannot in one act of perception count more
than a very few dots irregularly placed on a sheet of paper. If more
than that few they must have some arrangement. Nine must be perhaps in
three threes, twelve in four threes or three fours. But even before
twenty is reached, no arrangement will permit one act of perception to
accomplish the numbering. There is merely a considerable number, and
actual unitary counting--of units or groups--is necessary to know how
large it is.
But now let there be a sufficient number of dots to suggest to the eye
say a flower form or a frieze pattern, and let them be so arranged.
Before that arrangement they were a mere horde of _ones_; in their
definite arrangement they have a _meaning_, excite an idea, a state of
consciousness. Is not the advent of this meaning, the perception of
this form as a whole, a new and transcendental kind of counting? Number
in this sense, is form; and the form is form and not inchoateness,
chaos, just because of its meaning; that is, because of the state of
consciousness it excites in us.
You can count the ticks of the clock--as ones. If they were four
times as fast you could perhaps still count them. As they became more
rapid than that they would pass beyond the power of counting. As they
became still more rapid they would presently cease to be units at all
_and become a musical note_. Now they excite what might be called an
idea, a state of feeling peculiar to that number per second. Is not
the perception of that number _as a note_ a kind of counting? Let the
number per second be now suddenly doubled. Are we aware of the ratio of
this new number to the previous one? Yes, but as a rise of an octave
in the note, not as a counted doubling. To this corresponds another
state of feeling, partly due to the new note as it is, partly due to
its relation to the old one. It is a perception of ratio appearing in
consciousness as aesthetic feeling.
Set this clock to beat twice as fast again, and having listened a
moment so as to get the sense of the new note, stop it. Set a second
clock to beat _five_ for the first one's four. Listen so as to get the
sense of it and then stop that clock also. Set a third to beat _six_
for the first one's four and do the same.
Now start them all at once. You cannot by counting ascertain that
whilst one beats six the other two are respectively beating five and
four. But your appreciation of the fact takes the form of _hearing
the musical chord do, mi, sol_, C, E, G, the common chord in its
first position. Is not the perception of that chord, the acceptation
of that state of feeling, really a recognition of the ratio, a highly
transcendental counting? In the feeling you have the _meaning_ of the
numbers and of the ratios between them. It is those numbers themselves
viewed from a high standpoint.
The same might be said of every other chord. Listening to music is
perceiving ratios of vibratory speed between the successive notes and
chords, transcendental counting. The feelings aroused are what those
ratios _mean_. The meaning, the feeling, of the composer gets out into
expression through those numbers and ratios. Number in the ordinary
one-plus-one sense is the body of music; number in the transcendental
sense is its soul.
We cannot in the ordinary sense count ether-touches on the optic
nerve. But when they reach a certain number of trillions per second we
suddenly perceive the _meaning_ of that number--which we call the color
red or the sensation of redness. When the rapidity is seven-fourths as
many we get the sensation violet. But there is more than a sensation;
the colors have an _aesthetic_ and emotional value. And when colors,
that is rates, are juxtaposited in certain ways we get _art_ and the
value may become _spiritual_.
But no two people are affected in exactly the same way by the same
piece of music or of art work, though the souls of both may be touched.
Since, as we have seen, the highest aspect of number and ratio is
_spiritual meaning_, we can already see something in the Pythagorean
saying that the soul is a number and a ratio or harmony. In its
self-consciousness it has a spiritual meaning for itself; it means
something to itself; it understands itself. And so each soul, each with
its own special nature or meaning, reacts a little differently to the
spiritual meaning of numbers and ratios coming to it from without.