soul and body in his solitude.
Lo! the roses under the night dress themselves in silence, and
expect no mortal applaud--content with that of their voiceless
God.”
And again:
“O, wash me and wash me again with thy light,
And burn my body to a flame of soul!
It is this moment that I conquer the intervention of flesh,
And its rebellions that worked in me at unexpected time.
It’s not too much to say I am a revelation or a wonder,
Winging as a falcon into the breast of loveliness and air.”
And again:
“... What a bird
Dreams in the moonlight is my dream,
What a rose sings is my song.”
“O, to lose the world and gain a song,” he cries, and then, “I am glad
to be no-man to-day, with the laughter and dance of the sea soul.” His
thoughts fall like leaves in autumn “on the snowy cheeks of his paper.”
His is the poetry of self-abnegation, of identification of himself
with the world. His soul dances “on the silver strings” of the rain.
“We,” he sings, are “happy to be biographers of each other, I and a
bird.” He flies himself as a kite, to be lifted or let fall by the
winds that do not move at all those whose pride is in their sage and
measured footsteps on the ground.
In the last of his volumes there are a few specimens of Japanese
seventeen-syllabled verse, _hokku_, and in a note Noguchi writes that
such a poem “in Japanese mind, might be compared with a tiny star, I
dare say, carrying the whole sky at its back. It is like a slightly
open door, where you may steal into the realm of poesy. Its value
depends on how much it suggests. The Hokku poet’s chief aim is to
impress the reader with the high atmosphere in which he is living.”
The Hokku poet, like Noguchi, never writes of the thing about which
he is writing. The emotions he wishes to express are too subtle for
description in words, and can only be written of in the spaces between
the lines, just as between the petals of a flower we may find dreams
that the flower has never known, and the suggestions of something less
ponderable than the earth in which it had its roots. An example of
Hokku poetry will illustrate the method of all Noguchi’s:
“Where the flowers sleep,
Thank God! I shall sleep to-night.
Oh, come, butterfly.”
That is valuable as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a pearl
to be dissolved in the wine of a mood. Pearls are not wine, nor in
themselves to be thought of as drink, but there is a kind of magic in
the wine in which they are dissolved.
In Noguchi’s poems there is the co-operation between silence and speech
of which Carlyle was thinking when he wrote: “In a Symbol there is
concealment and yet revelation: here therefore by Silence and Speech
acting together, comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be
itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their
union be!” In many poems of the French symbolists the Speech is almost
meaningless, except in the Silence that is covered by its melody.
In Noguchi both Speech and Silence are full of a charm that we can
scarcely find in life but in fortunate rare moods. He writes:
“I am stirring the waves of Reverie with my meaningless but
wisdom-wreathed syllables.”
But he is incapable of denying his own charm to the carefully-worded
accompaniment of the Silence with which he is really concerned. He sees
the world with eyes too guileless not to make it alive, even when using
it as an invocation. He sees ideas too clearly not to make them, even
in a spell, independently vivid for his listeners. For an example of
the one take this picture:
“Alas, the mother cow, with matron eyes, utters her bitter heart,
kidnapped of her children by the curling gossamer mist!”
For an example of the other, this idea:
“The Universe, too, has somewhere its shadow; but what about my
songs?
An there be no shadow, no echoing to the end--my broken-throated
lute will never again be made whole.”
He is a poet whose flame has been so scrupulously tended as to flicker
with the slightest breath. He is as many-mooded as the combinations
between sunshine and shadow. His poetry actually _is_ the thing that
has induced a mood in him, trimmed of all that he has had to remove
for himself, and so made into something between nature and that pure
elevation of mind from which Noguchi feels. This quality of pale
flame-like emotion is common to all his poems, extraordinarily various
as they are.
Sometimes he speaks with grandeur, as in these lines:
“When I am lost in the deep body of the mist on a hill,
The universe seems built with me as its pillar!
Am I the God upon the face of the deep, nay deepless deepness in the
beginning?”
Sometimes wistfully:
“Alas! my soul is like a paper lantern, its paste wetted off under
the rain.
_My love, wilt thou not come back to-night?_
Lo, the snail at my door stealthily hides his horns.
_Oh, put forth thy honourable horns for my sake!
Where is Truth? Where is Light?_”
Sometimes questioning:
“My poetry begins with the tireless songs of the cricket, on the lean
grey-haired hill, in sober-faced evening.
And the next page is Stillness----
And what then, about the next to that?
Alas, the God puts his universe-covering hand over its sheets!
_Master, take off your hand for the humble servant!_
Asked in vain:----
How long for my meditation?”
But it is impossible with the quotations permissible in an article to
give an adequate presentment of a poet whose poems are so separate
that a hundred of them do not suffice for his expression. Noguchi has,
like Verlaine, escaped the wisdom of experience; his latest moods are
as sky-clear as his first, different though they are in technique and
in feeling. Each one of them is a glint of light from a diamond; it is
impossible, but in seeing innumerable glints together, satisfactorily
to perceive the diamond itself.
Noguchi’s technique is his own, though it would be possible to find
in reminiscent phrases suggestions of influence. A man using English
words with something of the surprising daring of the Irish peasants
on whose talk Mr. Synge modelled his prose, using them, too, like a
foreigner who has fallen in love with them, he is able to give them a
morning freshness newer and stranger than is given them (though the
words of all fine writers are newly discovered) by men whose ancestors
have bandied them about. He uses them in short and long lines that,
in his later books, learn more and more of rhythm. Rhyme he has not
attempted, and it would, I think, have hampered the butterfly-flash
of his verse from thought to thought. In _The Summer Cloud_ many of
the poems of his early books are altered to prose simply by the plan
of their printing. The type is differently set on the page and they
are called prose poems. I do not know what led Noguchi to make this
experiment, but it proved that the irregular, broken lines in which his
poems were originally published had a real power over the effect the
words produced. The spaces between the lines were a kind of thought
punctuation, and the mind needed these moments between the little,
breathless, scarcely-worded sighs that make his poems. In reading
them aloud it becomes clear that the ritual of the line-spacing was
more important than that of commas or full-stops. Noguchi’s songs are
like bird flights, timing themselves with the pulse of the mind that
follows them. His ideal is a poetry of pure suggestion whose melody
shall be of thought, capricious and uncertain as the mind, but only
with the mind’s caprice, the mind’s uncertainty. The following poem was
printed as prose in _The Summer Cloud_, and as it stands here in _The
Pilgrimage_.
“Little Fairy,
Little Fairy by a hearth,
Flight in thine eyes,
Hush on thy feet,
Shall I go with thee up to Heaven
By the road of the fire-flame?
Little Fairy,
Little Fairy by a river,
Dance in thy heart,
Longing at thy lips,
Shall I go down with thee to “Far-Away,”
Rolling over the singing bubbles?
Little Fairy,
Little Fairy by a poppy,
Dream in thy hair,
Solitude under thy wings,
Shall I sleep with thee to-night in the golden cup
Under the stars?”
It is easy, in reading it aloud, to recognise that its form is not
accidental, but follows, breath for breath, the movements of the mind.
But who shall analyse charm, or separate the tints of the opal? In
writing of Noguchi, I am writing of something that can only be defined
by itself. I can only take shred after shred from the cloak of gossamer
he has woven for himself, and only hope in doing so to persuade other
readers to buy his books and find for themselves a hundred shreds
as beautiful as these. The frontispiece to _The Pilgrimage_ is a
reproduction of a drawing by Utamaru, a thing of four pale colours and
a splash of black, and made as light as wind by curves as subtle and as
indefinable as those traced by worshipping stars round the object of
their adoration. I had forgotten that it is the picture of a girl, and
that fact is, indeed, as immaterial as the titles of Noguchi’s poems.
In looking at it, I forget not only its subject, but the book in which
it is, for this art, of poet or painter, Verlaine, Noguchi, Utamaru,
Whistler, frees us, infecting us with its own freedom, from the world
which is too much with us, for the exploration of that other world of
dream which, unless we, too, are children, is with us so fitfully, and
so seldom.
“Beckoned by an appointed hand, unseen yet sure, in holy air
We wander as a wind, silver and free,
With one song in heart, we, the children of prayer.
Our song is not of a city’s fall;
No laughter of a kingdom bids our feet wait;
Our heart is away, with sun, wind, and rain:
We, the shadowy roamers on the holy highway.”
1909.
KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH
KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH
Definitions, like mythologies, wear out. It is then important to
replace them. Aladdin’s wife had a choice, but we have none. We must
change our old lamps for new, or sit in the dark. A natural philosopher
who retained the mythological definition of thunder could not speak
of lightning to young men who had learnt of electricity without an
air of irrelevance of which he might be quite unconscious. Not so his
listeners, who would brush his explanations impatiently aside as soon
as they knew the beliefs on which he based them. Whenever historians
or critics seem irrelevant, we are safe in assuming a difference
between their definitions and our own. When they seem irrelevant to
many people beside ourselves, we can go further and assume that their
definitions are either worn out or not yet accepted. Sometimes, of
course, they are without definitions either old or new, but then they
need not trouble us, for they disappear like cuttle-fishes in the
darkness of their own ink. There is at the present day a widespread
dissatisfaction with historians of literature. It is impossible not to
feel that their dicta do not matter, that their sense of perspective
is wrong or uncertain, that their books are of no use to us except as
bibliographies. A new definition of literature is needed, that shall
give them some scale, some standard to which they can refer. For
without such standard or scale, they can do no more than gossip, or
judge poetry by its passion, by its sense, by its smoothness, or by
any other half-remembered scrap from a definition that is no longer
adequate.
If we would get rid of these irrelevancies, and write histories of
literature that shall deal with the matter of which they propose to
treat, we must find a new standard of values, and to find that we
must make a new definition. We must have a statement of the nature of
literature applicable not to the books of one nation of one time only,
but to those of all nations and of all times. It must supply us with
terms in which we can state the aims of widely different schools and
writers, with regard to their medium and not to any accidental quality.
If it is to do that we must escape from the prejudices of our own time
(which may be invisible to us) by seeking our formula in a definition
of the medium common to all writers, a statement of the function of
words in combination.
To make such a statement I have borrowed two epithets from the
terminology of physical science. Energy is described by physicists
as kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is force actually exerted.
Potential energy is force that a body is in a position to exert.
Applying these terms to language, without attempting too strict
an analogy, I wish to define literature, or rather the medium of
literature, as a combination of kinetic with potential speech. In
this combination the two are coincident. There is no such thing in
literature as speech purely kinetic or purely potential. Purely kinetic
speech is prose, not good prose, not literature, but colourless
prose, prose without atmosphere, the sort of prose that M. Jourdain
discovered he had been speaking all his life. It says things. An
example of purely potential speech may be found in music. I do not
think it can be made with words, though we can give our minds a taste
of it in listening to a meaningless but narcotic incantation, or a
poem in a language that we do not understand. The proportion between
kinetic and potential speech and the energy of the combination varies
with different works and the literature of different ages. There is no
literature to which it is impossible to apply the formula. Let us try
to clarify it by example and particularisation.
It may be asked, what of ballad poetry in which there is much so stated
as to approach purely kinetic speech? Does not the admitted power
of a sea-song, a song whose words are utterly trivial, disprove our
assertion? It does not; for to such songs or chanties the music to
which they are sung has given a quality of potential speech, without
which they would be worthless and speedily forgotten. In that case
the words and the melody respectively represent kinetic and potential
speech. It has been very truly said that a prima-donna can turn the
alphabet to poetry by the emotional power of her voice.
It may further be asked by any one who has not clearly apprehended my
meaning (and this would be more than excusable), Do I mean to suggest
that literature is not literature unless it contains a double meaning?
and, if so, do I not find in allegory the most perfect example of the
simultaneous existence of kinetic and potential speech? This would
indeed be a _reductio ad absurdum_. I must answer, that allegory
(though it may represent the result of an early guess at the nature of
art) is not necessarily poetry. There is, indeed, a gross and obvious
duality of meaning in such a work as _The Faërie Queene_. The tale
written on the paper enables us to reconstruct another. But that other
might have been written with no greater difficulty. It does not aid,
and may clog with external preoccupations, the tale that we sit down
to read. It is an impertinent shadow, a dog that keeps too closely at
our heels. Hazlitt rebukes those who think that the allegory of _The
Faërie Queene_ will bite them. We are more afraid that it will lick our
hands, and all we ask is, that it will allow itself to be forgotten.
An acrostic sonnet may be a good sonnet, but we are not likely to
perceive its excellence if we are intent upon the initial letters of
the lines. No; allegory may be a rude attempt to copy in things said
the duality of poetic speech. The old delight in conscious allegory may
be comparable to the modern delight in conscious symbolism. But we must
not forget for a moment that the resemblance is only one of analogy.
When Spenser writes of Mammon’s cave:
“Both roof, and floor, and walls were all of gold
But overgrown with rust and old decay,
And hid in darkness that none could behold
The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day
Did never in that house itself display,
But a faint shadow of uncertain light;
Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away;
Or as the moon clothéd with cloudy night,
Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright.”
When he writes thus, we do not, in our search for potential speech,
have to remember that he is writing of the love of money. Away with
such tedious recollections. The stanza is like a picture by Rembrandt
of an alchemist’s laboratory, where dusty alembic and smouldering
fire mean far more than themselves. The lines say something, but we
hear much for which they have not words. “The moon clothéd with cloudy
night,” is not richer in suggestion than that same description. Not in
the allegory but in the words themselves, their order and their melody,
must we find, if they are to be literature, that combination of kinetic
and potential speech.
Let me take another example of fine poetry, and show that it does
perform in itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the
first stanza of Blake’s “The Tiger”:
“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
It is impossible to deny the power of suggestion wielded by those four
lines, a power utterly disproportionate to what is actually said. The
kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed
tiger of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and
on either side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the
phosphorescence of another speech, that we cannot so easily overhear.
And who shall speak in fit terms of its potentiality? That glowing
image, that surprised address; not in the enumeration of such things
shall we come upon its secret.
The test of a formula is, that it shall fit. It must enable us to
co-ordinate scattered knowledge, and throw into a clear perspective
the jumble of loose statements and scraps of information whose
value we cannot but recognise, although they have remained outside
previous schemes and done little more than disturb the equilibrium of
once-established theories. It is a comfort and a joy to a thinker when
he can say that a formula of his has almost been proposed by minds that
have approached his problem along roads other than his own. When he can
find statements, true in themselves but inadequate, pegging out, as
it were, the ground from which his formula has been dug, he can feel
that it is no mere chance that has given it a momentary appearance of
usefulness. He can speak of it with the solid confidence that it has
behind it the collaboration of his predecessors.
We can bring such confidence to the use of this formula of kinetic
and potential speech, for to whatever problem of literary theory or
phenomenon of the history of literature we apply it, we find that it
has been almost stated by those who have separately considered that
problem or phenomenon. It smelts the ore that they have dug, and forges
a weapon for the attack not of one problem, but of all.
For example; though kinetic speech may be translated without loss from
one language to another, potential speech would not be potential but
kinetic if we were able to express it otherwise than by itself. This is
what Shelley means when he denies the possibility of the translation
of poetry, though he does not perceive the full reason, but only that
the poetic quality of a poem is partly dependent on a succession
of inimitable sounds. His statement, incomplete though it is, is a
recognition of the duality of poetic speech. He does not for a moment
contend that we cannot render the meaning; he sees that the meaning is
not all. The body is one thing and the soul is another. If we leave the
soul behind we have nothing but dead matter, fit for manure or food.
Life, or poetry, delicate-footed, mysterious, gracious with knowledge
of her mystery, is passed away and we cannot recapture her.
Sometimes, indeed, she goes without our interference, and disappears
only because of our neglect. There are poems that many men cannot
perceive to be poetry. There are others, once poetry, now no longer
so. Let us apply our formula to these phenomena, and first to the
varying popularity of poetry, since our solution of this question will
help us in solving the other. We shall find that the nearer poetry
approaches to kinetic speech, the more easily is it apprehended by the
multitude. Kinetic speech secures its effects by the presentation of
facts, situations and stories, which are stuff not so fine as to slip
through the coarse meshes of the general understanding. This explains
the immediate and wide popularity of such poets as Longfellow, Scott,
and Macaulay. Because prose, as a rule, depends more nearly on its
kinetic than on its potential utterance, it is, as a rule, the more
widely read. When, as in the hands of some nineteenth century writers,
it emphasizes the potential element of speech it correspondingly
narrows its public. Whenever poetry of high potentiality is read by a
large public it will be found that its potential speech is condoned
for them or hidden from them by more than usually vigorous kinetic
speech. For potential speech secures its effects by suggestion. There
is a bloom on its wings that a callous retina does not perceive. It
is like a butterfly that has visited flowers and scatters their scent
in its flight. The scent and the fluttering of its bloom-laden wings
are more important than the direction or speed of its flying. It is
always easier for the public to say, how fast, or where it is going
than to notice these delicate things. The kinetic speech of a poem is
understood by all; the potential depends for its apprehension upon
the taste and knowledge of the reader. Words must have for us the
associations that they had for the poet. We must be able to see them
with his eyes, hear them with his ears, and taste their scents with
nostrils not dissimilar to his. In time these things change. Unpopular
poetry becomes quite popular, and indeed, no longer poetry, as it
loses, through usage or forgetfulness, its proximity to the condition
of potential speech. Accents are shifted from one to another syllable,
and we should be deaf to the melody if we were unable to replace them.
New meanings gather round the words, and they come back from later
travels disguised in strange perfumes. The kinetic speech may be
disturbed, but the potential has disappeared in a jargon of new sounds,
a quarrel of new memories, and a chaos of new odours. Sometimes indeed,
it is as if it had never existed.
In this light it is easy to understand the curious business of
criticism, and to formulate an account of what occurs when poetry dies,
or falls asleep like the princess in the wood, to be awakened after
two centuries by a critic’s kiss. The Elizabethan dramatists lost
their potential and were judged only by their kinetic speech during
the eighteenth century. They were considered coarse and bloody-minded,
because there is rapine and murder in their plays. Lamb restored to
them the potentiality they had lost and turned bleak rock to flowering
country. Spenser had become a mere monger of allegory, until Hazlitt
and Leigh Hunt reconstituted him poet by discovering for themselves
and others the attitude that restores to his kinetic its lost
potential speech. Writers of Wordsworth’s generation realised, at least
subconsciously, that a poem is not independent of knowledge. They tried
to help us by printing at the head of a poem information about the
circumstances of its conception. When a poet tells us that a sonnet was
composed “on Westminster Bridge” or “suggested by Mr. Westell’s views
of the caves, &c. in Yorkshire,” he is trying to ease for us the task
of aesthetic reproduction to which his poem is a stimulus. He is trying
to ensure that we shall approach it as he did, and hear as well as the
kinetic the potential speech that he values. There is a crudity about
such obvious assistance, and it would be quite insufficient without
the wider knowledge on which we draw unconsciously as we read. But the
crudity of those pitiable scraps of proffered information is not so
remarkable as the dulness of perception that can allow a man to demand
of a poem that it shall itself compel him accurately to enjoy it. It
is possible that much of the old poetry that now seems to us no more
than direct speech was once wrapped in a veil of suggestion. It is the
critic’s business to rediscover those forgotten veils and to restore to
the kinetic the magic of potential speech.