Perhaps I ought here carefully to state that in propounding the idea
that the whole common speech of early man may have been rhythmical
through the operation of uniformity of syllables and periodicity of
breath, and that for this reason prose, which is practically verse of
a very complex rhythm, was naturally a later development; in
propounding this idea, I say, I do not mean to declare that the
prehistoric man, after a hard day's work on a flint arrow-head at his
stone-quarry would dance back to his dwelling in the most beautiful
rhythmic figures, would lay down his palaeolithic axe to a slow song,
and, striking an operatic attitude, would call out to his wife to
leave off fishing in the stream and bring him a stone mug of water,
all in a most sublime and impassioned flight of poetry. What I do mean
to say is that if the prehistoric man's syllables were uniform, and
his breath periodic, then the rhythmical results described would
follow. Here let me at once illustrate this, and advance a step
towards my final point in this connection, by reminding you how easily
the most commonplace utterances in modern English, particularly when
couched mainly in words of one syllable, fall into quite respectable
verse rhythms. I might illustrate this, but Dr. Samuel Johnson has
already done it for me:--"I put my hat upon my head and walked into
the Strand, and there I met another man whose hat was in his hand." We
have only to arrange this in proper form in order to see that it is a
stanza of verse quite perfect as to all technical requirement:--
"I put my hat upon my head,
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man,
Whose hat was in his hand."
Now let me ask you to observe precisely what happens, when by adding
words here and there in this verse we more and more obscure its verse
form and bring out its prose form. Suppose, for example, we here write
"hastily," and here "rushed forth," and here "encountered," and here
"hanging," so as to make it read:
"I hastily put my hat upon my head,
And rushed forth into the Strand,
And there I encountered another man,
Whose hat was hanging in his hand."
Here we have made unmitigated prose, but how? Remembering that
original verse was in iambic 4's and 3's,
___ ___ __ ____
I put | my hat | up-on | my head |[**Diacritical marks]
--by putting in the word "hastily" in the first line, we have not
_destroyed_ the rhythm; we still have the rhythmic sequence, "my hat upon
my head," unchanged; but we have merely _added_ brief rhythms, namely that
of the word "hastily," which we may call a modern or logaoedic dactyl
(hastily)[**Symbols above hastily]; that is to say, instead now of leaving
our first line _all_ iambic, we have varied that rhythmus with another; and
in so doing have converted our verse into prose. Similarly, in the second
line, "rushed forth," which an English tongue would here deliver as a
spondee--rushed forth--_varies_ the rhythm by this spondaic intervention,
but still leaves us the original rhythmic cluster, "into the Strand." So,
of the other introduced words, "encountered" and "hanging," each has its
own rhythm--for an English tongue always gives these words with definite
time-relations between the syllables, that is, in rhythm. Therefore, in
order to make prose out of this verse, we have not destroyed the rhythms,
we have added to them. We have not made it _formless_, we have made it
contain _more forms_.
Now, in this analysis, which I have tried to bring to its very
simplest terms, I have presented what seems to me the true genesis of
prose; and have set up a distinction, which, though it may appear
abstract and insignificant at present, we shall presently see lies at
the bottom of some most remarkable and pernicious fallacies concerning
literature. That distinction is, that the relation of prose to verse
is _not_ the relation of the _formless_ to the _formal_: it is the
relation of _more forms_ to _fewer forms_. It is this relation which
makes prose a _freer_ form than verse.
When we are writing in verse, if we have the line with an iambus (say)
then our next words or syllables must make an iambus, and we are
confined to that form; but if in prose, our next word need not be an
iambus because the first was, but may be any one of several possible
rhythmic forms; thus, while in verse we _must_ use _one_ form, in
prose we _may_ use _many_ forms; and just to the extent of these
possible forms is prose freer than verse. We shall find occasion
presently to remember that prose is freer than verse, _not_ because
prose is formless while verse is formal, but because any given
sequence of prose has _more forms_ in it than a sequence of verse.
Here, reserving to a later place the special application of all this
to the novel, I have brought my first general point to a stage where
it constitutes the basis of the second one. You have already heard
much of "forms"--of the verse-form, the prose-form, of form in art,
and the like. Now, in the course of a considerable experience in what
Shakspeare sadly calls "public means," I have found no matter upon
which wider or more harmful misconceptions exist among people of
culture, and particularly among us Americans, than this matter of the
true functions of forms in art, of the true relation of science--which
we may call the knowledge of forms--to art, and most especially of
these functions and relations in literary art. These misconceptions
have flowered out into widely different shapes.
In one direction, for example, we find a large number of timorous
souls, who believe that science, in explaining everything as they
singularly fancy, will destroy the possibility of poetry, of the
novel, in short of all works of the imagination; the idea seeming to
be that the imagination always requires the hall of life to be
darkened before it displays its magic, like the modern spiritualistic
seance-givers who can do nothing with the rope-tying and the guitars
unless the lights are put out.
Another form of the same misconception goes precisely to the opposite
extreme, and declares that the advance of science with its incidents
is going to give a great new revolutionized democratic literature,
which will wear a slouch hat and have its shirt open at the bosom, and
generally riot in a complete independence of form.
And finally--to mention no more than a third phase--we may consider
the original misconception to have reached a climax which is at once
absurd and infernal, in a professedly philosophical work called _Le
Roman Experimentale_, recently published by M. Emile Zola, gravely
defending his peculiar novels as the records of scientific
experiments, and declaring that the whole field of imaginative effort
must follow his lead.
Now, if any of these beliefs are true, we are wickedly wasting our
time here in studying the novel--at least any other novels except M.
Zola's, and we ought to look to ourselves. Seriously, I do not believe
I could render you a greater service than by here arraying such
contribution as I can make towards some firm, clear and pious
conceptions as to this matter of form, of science, in art, before
briefly considering these three concrete errors I have enumerated--to
wit, the belief (1) that science will destroy all poetry, all
novel-writing and all imaginative work generally; (2) that science
will simply destroy the _old_ imaginative products and build up a new
formless sort of imaginative product in its stead; and (3) that
science will absorb into _itself_ all imaginative effort, so that
every novel will be merely the plain, unvarnished record of a
scientific experiment in passion. Let me submit two or three
principles whose steady light will leave, it seems to me, but little
space for perplexity as to these diverse claims.
Start, then, in the first place, with a definite recalling to yourself
of the province of form throughout our whole daily life. Here we find
a striking consensus, at least in spirit, between the deliverances of
the sternest science and of the straitest orthodoxy. The latter, on
the one hand, tells us that in the beginning the earth was without
form and void; and it is only after the earth is formulated--after the
various forms of the lights, of land and water, bird, fish and man
appear--it is only then that life and use and art and relation and
religion become possible. What we call the creation, therefore, is not
the making something out of nothing, but it is the giving of _form_ to
a something which, though existing, existed to no purpose because it
had no form.
On the other hand, the widest generalizations of science bring us
practically to the same view. Science would seem fairly to have
reduced all this host of phenomena which we call the world into a
congeries of motions in many forms. What we know by our senses is
simply such forms of these motions as our senses have a correlated
capacity for. The atoms of this substance, moving in orbits too narrow
for human vision, impress my sense with a certain property which I
call hardness or resistance, this "hardness" being simply our name for
one form of atom-motion when impressing itself on the human sense. So
color, shape, &c.; these are our names representing a correlation
between certain other forms of motion and our senses. Regarding the
whole universe thus as a great congeries of forms of motion, we may
now go farther and make for ourselves a scientific and useful
generalization, reducing a great number of facts to a convenient
common denominator, by considering that Science is the knowledge of
these forms; that Art is the creation of beautiful forms; that
Religion is the faith in the infinite Form-giver and in that infinity
of forms which many things lead us to believe as existing, but
existing beyond any present correlative capacities of our senses; and
finally that Life is the control of all these forms to the
satisfaction of our human needs.
And now advancing a step: when we remember how all accounts, the
scientific, the religious, the historical, agree that the progress of
things is _from_ chaos or formlessness _to_ form, and, as we saw in
the case of verse and prose, afterwards from the one-formed to the
many-formed, we are not disturbed by any shouts, however stentorian,
of a progress that professes to be winning freedom by substituting
formlessness for form; we know that the ages are rolling the other
way,--who shall stop those wheels? We know that what they really do
who profess to substitute formlessness for form is to substitute a
bad form for a good one, or an ugly form for a beautiful one. Do not
dream of getting rid of form; your most cutting stroke at it but gives
us two forms for one. For, in a sense which adds additional reverence
to the original meaning of those words, we may devoutly say that in
form we live and move and have our being. How strange, then, the
furtive apprehension of danger lying behind too much knowledge of
form, too much technic, which one is amazed to find prevailing so
greatly in our own country.
But, advancing a further step from the particular consideration of
science as the knowledge of forms, let us come to the fact that as all
art is a congeries of forms, each art must have its own peculiar
science; and always we have, in a true sense, the art of an art and
the science of that art. For example, correlative to the art of music,
we have the general science of music, which indeed consists of several
quite separate sciences. If a man desire to become a musical composer,
he is absolutely obliged to learn (1) the science of Musical Form, (2)
the science of Harmony, and (3) the science of Orchestration or
Instrumentation.
The science of musical form, concerns this sort of matter, for
instance. A symphony has generally four great divisions, called
movements, separated usually from each other by a considerable pause.
Each of these movements has a law of formation: it consists of two
main subjects, or melodies, and a modulation-part. The sequence of
these subjects, the method of varying them by causing now one and now
another of the instruments to come forward and play the subject in
hand while subordinate parts are assigned to the others, the interplay
of the two subjects in the modulation-part,--all this is the
subject-matter of a science which every composer must laboriously
learn.
But again: he must learn the great science of harmony, and of that
wonderful tonality which has caused our music to be practically a
different art from what preceding ages called music; this science of
harmony having its own body of classifications and formulated laws
just as the science of Geology has, and a voluminous literature of its
own. Again, he must painfully learn the range and capacities of each
orchestral instrument, lest he write passages for the violin which no
violin can play, &c., and further, the particular ideas which seem to
associate themselves with the tone-color of each instrument, as the
idea of women's voices with the clarionet, the idea of tenderness and
childlikeness with the oboe, &c. This is not all; the musical composer
may indeed write a symphony if he has these three sciences of music
well in hand; but a fourth science of music, namely, the physics of
music, or musical acoustics, has now grown to such an extent that
every composer will find himself lame without a knowledge of it.
And so the art of painting has its correlative science of painting,
involving laws of optics, and of form; the art of sculpture, its
correlative science of sculpture, involving the science of human
anatomy, &c.; and each one of the literary arts has its correlative
science--the art of verse its science of verse, the art of prose its
science of prose. Lastly, we all know that no amount of genius will
supply the lack of science in art. Phidias may be all afire with the
conception of Jove, but unless he is a scientific man to the extent of
a knowledge of anatomy, he is no better artist than Strephon who
cannot mould the handle of a goblet. What is Beethoven's genius until
Beethoven has become a scientific man to the extent of knowing the
sciences of Musical Form, of Orchestration, and of Harmony?
But now if I go on and ask what would be the worth of Shakspeare's
genius unless he were a scientific man to the extent of knowing the
science of English verse, or what would be George Eliot's genius
unless she knew the science of English prose or the science of
novel-writing, a sort of doubtful stir arises, and it would seem as if
a suspicion of some vague esoteric difference between the relation of
the literary arts to their correlative sciences and the relation of
other arts to _their_ correlative sciences influenced the general
mind.
I am so unwilling you should think me here fighting a mere man of
straw who has been arranged with a view to the convenience of knocking
him down, and I find such mournful evidences of the complete
misconception of form, of literary science in our literature, that,
with a reluctance which every one will understand, I am going to draw
upon a personal experience, to show the extent of that misconception.
Some of you may remember that a part of the course of lectures which
your present lecturer delivered here last year were afterwards
published in book-form, under the title of _The Science of English
Verse_. Happening in the publisher's office some time afterwards, I
was asked if I would care to see the newspaper notices and criticisms
of the book, whereof the publishers had collected a great bundle. Most
curious to see if some previous ideas I had formed as to the general
relation between literary art and science would be confirmed, I read
these notices with great interest. Not only were my suspicions
confirmed: but it is perfectly fair to say that nine out of ten, even
of those which most generously treated the book in hand, treated it
upon the general theory that a work on the science of verse must
necessarily be a collection of rules for making verses. Now, not one
of these writers would have treated a work on the science of geology
as a collection of rules for making rocks; or a work on the science of
anatomy as a collection of rules for making bones or for procuring
cadavers. In point of fact, a book of rules for making verses might
very well be written; but then it would be a hand-book of the art of
verse, and would take the whole science of verse for granted,--like an
instruction-book for the piano, or the like.
If we should find the whole critical body of a continent treating
(say) Prof. Huxley's late work on the crayfish as really a
cookery-book, intended to spread intelligent ideas upon the best
methods of preparing shell-fish for the table, we should certainly
suspect something wrong; but this is precisely parallel with the
mistake already mentioned.
But even when the functions of form, of science, in literary art have
been comprehended, one is amazed to find among literary artists
themselves a certain apprehension of danger in knowing too much of the
forms of art. A valued friend who has won a considerable place in
contemporary authorship in writing me not long ago said, after much
abstract and impersonal admission of a possible science of verse--in
the way that one admits there may be griffins, but feels no great
concern about it--"_as for me I would rather continue to write verse
from pure instinct_."
This fallacy--of supposing that we do a thing by instinct simply because we
_learned_ to do it unsystematically and without formal teaching--seems a
curious enough climax to the misconceptions of literary science. You have
only to reflect a moment in order to see that not a single line of verse
was ever written by instinct alone since the world began. For--to go no
farther--the most poetically instinctive child is obliged at least to learn
the science of language--the practical relation of noun and verb and
connective--before the crudest line of verse can be written; and since no
child talks by instinct, since every child has to learn from others every
word it uses,--with an amount of diligence and of study which is really
stupendous when we think of it--what wild absurdity to forget these years
passed by the child in learning even the rudiments of the science of
language which must be well in hand, mind you, before even the rudiments of
the science of verse can be learned--what wild absurdity to fancy that one
is writing verse by instinct when even the language of verse, far from
being instinctive, had to be painfully, if unsystematically, learned as a
science.
Once, for all, remembering the dignity of form as we have traced it,
remembering the relations of Science as the knowledge of forms, of Art
as the creator of beautiful forms, of Religion as the aspiration
towards unknown forms and the unknown Form-giver, let us abandon this
unworthy attitude towards form, towards science, towards technic, in
literary art, which has so long sapped our literary endeavor.
The writer of verse is afraid of having too much form, of having too
much technic; he dreads it will interfere with his spontaneity.
No more decisive confession of weakness can be made. It is only
cleverness and small talent which is afraid of its spontaneity; the
genius, the great artist, is forever ravenous after new forms, after
technic; he will follow you to the ends of the earth if you will
enlarge his artistic science, if you will give him a fresh form. For
indeed genius, the great artist, never works in the frantic vein
vulgarly supposed; a large part of the work of the poet, for example,
is reflective; a dozen ideas in a dozen forms throng to his brain at
once; he must choose the best; even in the extremest heat and
sublimity of his raptus, he must preserve a god-like calm, and order
thus and so, and keep the rule so that he shall to the end be master
of his art and not be mastered by his art.
Charlotte Cushman used often to tell me that when she was, as the
phrase is, carried out of herself, she never acted well: she must have
her inspiration, she must be in a true _raptus_, but the _raptus_ must
be well in hand, and she must retain the consciousness, at once
sublime and practical, of every act.
There is an old aphorism--it is twelve hundred years old--which covers
all this ground of the importance of technic, of science, in the
literary art, with such completeness and compactness that it always
affects one like a poem. It was uttered, indeed, by a poet--and a rare
one he must have been--an old Armorican named Herve, of whom all
manner of beautiful stories have survived. This aphorism is, "He who
will not answer to the rudder, must answer to the rocks." If any of
you have read that wonderful description of shipwreck on these same
Armorican rocks which occurs in the autobiography of Millet, the
painter, and which was recently quoted in a number of _Scribner's
Magazine_, you can realize that one who lived in that old
Armorica--the modern Brittany from which Millet comes--knew full well
what it meant to answer to the rocks.
Now, it is precisely this form, this science, this technic, which is
the rudder of the literary artist, whether he work at verse or novels.
I wish it were everywhere written, even in the souls of all our young
American writers, that he who will not answer to the rudder shall
answer to the rocks. This was the belief of the greatest literary
artist our language has ever produced.
We have direct contemporary testimony that Shakspeare was supremely
solicitous in this matter of form. Ben Jonson, in that hearty
testimonial, "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William
Shakspeare, and What He Hath Left Us," which was prefixed to the
edition of 1623, says, after praises which are lavish even for an
Elizabethan eulogy:
Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
(Meaning here thy technic, thy care of form, thy science),
My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part;
For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,
_For a good poet's made as well as born,
And such wert thou._ Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race.
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
_In his well-turned and true-filed lines,
In each of which he seems to shake a lance_,
As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance.
No fear with Shakspeare of damaging his spontaneity; he shakes a lance
at the eyes of Ignorance in every line.
With these views of the progress of forms in general, of the relations
of Science--or the _knowledge_ of all forms--to Art, or the creation
of beautiful forms, we are prepared, I think, to maintain much
equilibrium in the midst of the discordant cries, already mentioned,
(1) of those who believe that Science will destroy all literary art;
(2) of those who believe that art is to advance by becoming democratic
and formless; (3) and lastly, of those who think that the future
novelist is to enter the service of science as a police-reporter in
ordinary for the information of current sociology.
Let us, therefore, inquire if it is really true--as I am told is much
believed in Germany, and as I have seen not unfrequently hinted in the
way of timorous apprehension in our own country--that science is to
abolish the poet and the novel-writer and all imaginative literature.
It is surprising that in all the discussions upon this subject the
matter has been treated as belonging solely to the future. But surely
life is too short for the folly of arguing from prophecy when we can
argue from history; and it seems to me this question is determined. As
matter of fact, science (to confine our view to English science) has
been already advancing with prodigious strides for two hundred and
fifty years, and side by side with it English poetry has been
advancing for the same period. Surely, whatever effect science has
upon poetry can be traced during this long companionship. While Hooke
and Wilkins and Newton and Horrox and the Herschels and Franklin and
Davy and Faraday and the Darwins and Dalton and Huxley and many more
have been penetrating into physical nature, Dryden, Pope, Byron,
Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, have been singing;
while gravitation, oxygen, electro-magnetism, the atomic theory, the
spectroscope, the siren, are being evolved, the _Ode to St. Cecilia_,
the _Essay on Man_, _Manfred_, _A man's a man for a' that_, the _Ode
on Immortality_, _In Memoriam_, the _Ode to a Nightingale_, _The Psalm
of Life_, are being written. If indeed we go over into Germany, there
is Goethe, at once pursuing science and poetry.
Now, if we examine the course and progress of this poetry, born thus
within the very grasp and maw of this terrible science, it seems to me
that we find--as to the _substance_ of poetry--a steadily increasing
confidence and joy in the mission of the poet, in the sacredness of
faith and love and duty and friendship and marriage, and in the
sovereign fact of man's personality; while as to the _form_ of the
poetry, we find that just as science has pruned our faith (to make it
more faithful), so it has pruned our poetic form and technic, cutting
away much unproductive wood and efflorescence and creating finer
reserves and richer yields. Since it would be simply impossible, in
the space of these lectures, to illustrate this by any detailed view
of all the poets mentioned, let us confine ourselves to one, Alfred
Tennyson, and let us inquire how it fares with him. Certainly no more
favorable selection could be made for those who believe in the
destructiveness of science. Here is a man born in the midst of
scientific activity, brought up and intimate with the freest thinkers
of his time, himself a notable scientific pursuer of botany, and
saturated by his reading with all the scientific conceptions of his
age. If science is to sweep away the silliness of faith and love, to
destroy the whole field of the imagination and make poetry folly, it
is a miracle if Tennyson escape. But if we look into his own words,
this miracle beautifully transacts itself before our eyes. Suppose we
inquire, Has science cooled this poet's love? We are answered in No.
60 of _In Memoriam_:
If in thy second state sublime,
Thy ransomed reason change replies
With all the circle of the wise,
The perfect flower of human time;
And if thou cast thine eyes below,
How dimly character'd and slight,
How dwarf'd a growth of cold and night,
How blanch'd with darkness must I grow!
Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,
Where thy first form was made a man,
I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can
The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.
Here is precisely the same loving gospel that Shakspeare himself used
to preach, in that series of Sonnets which we may call _his_ In
Memoriam to his friend; the same loving tenacity, unchanged by three
hundred years of science. It is interesting to compare this No. 60 of
Tennyson's poem with Sonnet 32 of Shakspeare's series, and note how
both preach the supremacy of love over style or fashion.
If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time;
And though they be outstripped by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
"Had my friend's muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had bought,
To march in ranks of better equipage;
But since he died, and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love."
Returning to Tennyson: has science cooled his yearning for human
friendship? We are answered in No. 90 of _In Memoriam_. Where was ever
such an invocation to a dead friend to return!
When rosy plumelets tuft the larch,
And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;
Or underneath the barren bush
Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;
Come, wear the form by which I know
Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
The hope of unaccomplish'd years
Be large and lucid round thy brow.
When summer's hourly mellowing change
May breathe, with many roses sweet,
Upon the thousand waves of wheat,
That ripple round the lonely grange;
Come; not in watches of the night,
But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
Come, beauteous in thine after-form,
And like a finer light in light.
Or still more touchingly, in No. 49, for here he writes from the
depths of a sick despondency, from all the darkness of a bad quarter
of an hour.
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is racked with pains that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a fury, slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
Has it diminished his tender care for the weakness of others? We are
wonderfully answered in No. 33.
O thou that after toil and storm
Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air,
Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form.
Leave thou thy sister when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor then with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
Her faith thro' form is pure as thine,
Her hands are quicker unto good.
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine!
See thou, that countest reason ripe
In holding by the law within,
Thou fail not in a world of sin,
And ev'n for want of such a type.
Has it crushed out his pure sense of poetic beauty? Here in No. 84 we
have a poem which, for what I can only call absolute beauty, is simply
perfect.
Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare
The round of space, and rapt below
Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood,
And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows, and blow
The fever from my cheek, and sigh
The full new life that feeds thy breath
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death
Ill brethren, let the fancy fly
From belt to belt of crimson seas
On leagues of odor streaming far
To where in yonder orient star
A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.'
And finally we are able to see from his own words that he is not
ignorantly resisting the influences of science, but that he knows
science, reveres it and understands its precise place and function.
What he terms in the following poem (113 of _In Memoriam_) _Knowledge_
and _Wisdom_ are what we have been speaking of as Science and Poetry.
Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.
* * * * *
Let her know her place;
She is the second, not the first.
A higher hand must make her mild,
If all be not in vain; and guide
Her footsteps, moving side by side
With wisdom, like the younger child:
For she is earthly of the mind,
But Wisdom heavenly of the Soul.
O friend, who camest to thy goal
So early, leaving me behind,
I would the great world grew like thee
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity.
If then, regarding Tennyson as fairly a representative victim of
Science, we find him still preaching the poet's gospel of beauty, as
comprehending the evangel of faith, hope and charity, only preaching
it in those newer and finer forms with which science itself has
endowed him; if we find his poetry just so much stronger and richer
and riper by as much as he has been trained and beaten and disciplined
with the stern questions which scientific speculation has
put--questions which you will find presented in their most sombre
terribleness in Tennyson's _Two Voices_; if finally we find him
steadily regarding science as _knowledge_ which only the true poet can
vivify into _wisdom_:--then I say, life is too short to waste any of
it in listening to those who, in the face of this history, still
prophesy that Science is to destroy Poetry.
Nothing, indeed, would be easier than to answer all this argument upon
_a priori_ grounds: this argument is, in brief, that wonder and
mystery are the imagination's _material_, and that science is to
explain away all mystery. But what a crude view is this of
explanation! The moment you examine the process, you find that at
bottom explanation is simply the reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to
terms of familiar mysteries. For simplest example: here is a mass of
conglomerate: science explains that it is composed of a great number
of pebbles which have become fastened together by a natural cement.
But after all, is not one pebble as great a mystery as a mountain of
conglomerate? though we are familiar with the pebble, and unfamiliar
with the other. Now to the wise man, the poet, familiarity with a
mystery brings no contempt; to explanation of science, supremely
fascinating as it is, but opens up a new world of wonders, but adds to
old mysteries. Indeed, the wise searcher into nature always finds, as
a poet has declared, that
... "In seeking to undo
One riddle, and to find the true
I knit a hundred others new."
And so, away with this folly. Science, instead of being the enemy of
poetry, is its quartermaster and commissary--it forever purveys for
poetry, and just so much more as it shall bring man into contact with
nature, just so much more large and intense and rich will be the
poetry of the future and more abundant in its forms.
And here we may advance to our second class, who believe that the
poetry of the future is to be democratic and formless.
I need quote but a few scraps from characteristic sentences here and
there in a recent paper of Whitman's, in order to present a perfectly
fair view of his whole doctrine. When, for instance, he declares that
Tennyson's poetry is not the poetry of the future because, although it
is "the highest order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure and
almost always perfumed like the tuberose to an extreme of sweetness,"
yet it has "never one democratic page," and is "never free, naive
poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated;" when we find him
bragging of "the measureless viciousness of the great radical
republic" (the United States of course) "with its ruffianly
nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly
regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights,
errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those
fearful and varied, long and continued storm-and-stress stages (so
offensive to the well-regulated, college-bred mind), wherewith nature,
history and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past;"
and when finally we hear him tenderly declaring that "meanwhile
democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in
twilight--but 'tis the twilight of dawn;"--we are in sufficient
possession of the distinctive catch-words which summarize his
doctrine.
In examining it, a circumstance occurs to me at the outset which
throws a strange but effective light upon the whole argument. It seems
curious to reflect that the two poets who have most avowedly written
for the _people_, who have professed most distinctively to represent
and embody the thought of the people, and to be bone of the people's
bone, and flesh of the people's flesh, are precisely the two who have
most signally failed of all popular acceptance and who have most
exclusively found audience at the other extreme of culture. These are
Wordsworth and Whitman. We all know how strenuously and faithfully
Wordsworth believed that in using the simplest words and treating the
lowliest themes, he was bringing poetry back near to the popular
heart; yet Wordsworth's greatest admirer is Mr. Matthew Arnold, the
apostle of culture, the farthest remove from anything that could be
called popular; and in point of fact it is probable that many a
peasant who would feel his blood stir in hearing _A man's a man for a'
that_, would grin and guffaw if you should read him Wordsworth's
_Lambs_ and _Peter Grays_.
And a precisely similar fate has met Whitman. Professing to be a
mudsill and glorying in it, chanting democracy and the shirt-sleeves
and equal rights, declaring that he is nothing if not one of the
people; nevertheless the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing
to do with him, and it is safe to say that his sole audience has lain
among such representatives of the highest culture as Emerson and the
English _illuminated_.
The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, instead of being a
true democrat, is simply the most incorrigible of aristocrats masquing
in a peasant's costume; and his poetry, instead of being the natural
outcome of a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be
impossible except in a highly civilized society.