Nearly all modern artificial products, when compared with the ancient, are
characterized by greater mechanical finish and precision. Can we say,
therefore, they are more artistic? Is a gold coin of the time of Pericles,
so rude and simple, less artistic than the elaborate coins of our own day?
Is Japanese pottery, the glazing often ragged and uneven, less artistic
than the highly finished work of the moderns?
Are we quite sure, after all, that what we call "artistic form" is in any
high or fundamental sense artistic? Are the precise, the regular, the
measured, the finished, the symmetrical, indispensable to our conception
of art? If regular extrinsic form and measure and proportion are necessary
elements of the artistic, then geometrical flower-beds, and trees set in
rows or trained to some fancy pattern, ought to please the artist. But do
they? If we look for the artistic in these things, then Addison is a
greater artist than Shakespeare. Dr. Johnson says, "Addison speaks the
language of poets, and Shakespeare of men." Which is really the most
artistic? The one is the coin from the die, the other the coin from the
hand.
Tennyson's faultless form and finish are not what stamp him a great
artist. He would no doubt be glad to get rid of them if he could, at least
to keep them in abeyance and make them less obtrusive; he would give
anything for the freedom, raciness, and wildness of Shakespeare. But he is
not equal to these things. The culture, the refinement, the precision of a
correct and mechanical age have sunk too deeply into his soul. He has not
the courage or the spring to let himself go as Shakespeare did. Tennyson,
too, speaks the language of poets, and not of men; he savors of the
flower-garden, and not of the forest. Tennyson knows that he is an artist.
Shakespeare, apparently, never had such a thought; he is intent solely
upon holding the mirror up to nature. The former lived in an age of
criticism, and when the poets loved poetry more than they did life and
things; the latter, in a more virile time, and in "the full stream of the
world."
"Leaves of Grass" is not self-advertised as a work of art. The author had
no thought that you should lay down his book and say, "What a great
artist!" "What a master workman!" He would rather you should say, "What a
great man!" "What a loving comrade!" "What a real democrat!" "What a
healing and helpful force!" He would not have you admire his poetry: he
would have you filled with the breath of a new and larger and saner life;
he would be a teacher and trainer of men.
The love of the precise, the exact, the methodical, is characteristic of
an age of machinery, of a commercial and industrial age like ours. These
things are indispensable in the mill and counting-house, but why should we
insist upon them in poetry? Why should we cling to an arbitrary form like
the sonnet? Why should we insist upon a perfect rhyme, as if it was a cog
in a wheel? Why not allow and even welcome the freedom of half-rhymes, or
suggestive rhymes? Why, anyway, fold back a sentence or idea to get it
into a prescribed arbitrary form? Why should we call this verse-tinkering
and verse-shaping art, when it is only artifice? Why should we call the
man who makes one pretty conceit rhyme with another pretty conceit an
artist, and deny the term to the man whose sentences pair with great laws
and forces?
Of course it is much easier for a poet to use the regular verse-forms and
verse language than it is to dispense with them; that is, a much less
poetic capital is required in the former case than in the latter. The
stock forms and the stock language count for a good deal. A very small
amount of original talent may cut quite an imposing figure in the robes of
the great masters. Require the poet to divest himself of them, and to
speak in the language of men and in the spirit of real things, and see how
he fares.