Genuine art may sadden, but it cannot depress; it may bring a fresh
sense of the anguish of humanity, but it must from its very nature join
with this the consolation of an ideal. The tragedy of human life is in
art held to be the source of new courage, of nobler aspiration, because
it gives grander opportunities for human emotion to vindicate its
superiority to all disasters, all terrors, all woe. The reader does not
leave the great tragedies with a soured mind or a pessimistic disbelief
in life. "Lear," "Othello," "Romeo and Juliet," tragic as they are,
leave him quivering with sympathy but not with bitterness. The
inspiration of the thought of love triumphant over death, of moral
grandeur unsubdued by the worst that fate can do, lifts the mind above
the disaster. One puts down "The Kreutzer Sonata" with the very flesh
creeping with disgust at human existence; the same sin is treated no
less tragically in "The Scarlet Letter," yet the reader is left with an
inspiration and a nobler feeling toward life. The attitude of art is in
its essence hopeful, and the work of the pessimist must therefore fail,
even though it be informed with all the cleverness and the witchery of
genius.
It is, I believe, from something akin to a remote and perhaps
half-conscious perception of this principle that readers in general
desire that a novel shall end pleasantly. The popular sentiment in favor
of a "happy ending" is by no means so entirely wrong or so utterly
Philistine as it is the fashion in these super-æsthetical days to
assume. The trick of a doleful conclusion has masqued and paraded as a
sure proof of artistic inspiration when it is nothing of the kind.
Unhappy endings may be more common than happy ones in life, although
even that proposition is by no means proved; they seem so from the human
habit of marking the disagreeables and letting pleasant things go
unnoted. Writers of a certain school have assumed from this that they
were keeping more close to life if they left the reader at the close of
a story in a state of darkest melancholy; and they have made much parade
of the claim that this is not only more true to fact, but more artistic.
There is no reason for such an assumption. The artistic climax of a tale
is that which grows out of the story by compelling necessity. There are
many narrations, of course, which would become essentially false if made
to end gladly. When the ingenious Frenchman rewrote the last act of
"Hamlet," marrying off the Prince and dismissing him with Ophelia to
live happily ever after, the thing was monstrously absurd. The general
public is not wholly blind to these things. No audience educated up to
the point of enjoying "Hamlet" or "Othello" at all would be satisfied
with a sugar-candy conclusion to these. The public does ask, however,
and asks justly, that there shall be no meaningless agony; and if it
prefers tales which inevitably come to a cheerful last chapter, this
taste is in the line with the great principle that it is the function of
art to uplift and inspire.
It has already been said over and over that it is the office of
literature to show the meaning of life, and the meaning of life is not
only what it is but what it may be. To paint the actualities of life is
only to state a problem, and it is the mission of art to offer a
solution. The novel which can go no further than the presentation of the
apparent fact is from the higher standpoint futile because it fails to
indicate the meaning of that fact; it falls short as art in so far as it
fails to justify existence.
Lowell complains:--
Modern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious, and
therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be "the world's sweet
inn," whither we repair for refreshment and repose, has become rather
a watering-place, where one's private touch of liver-complaint is
exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk is a
narrative of morbid symptoms.--_Chaucer._
We have introduced into fiction that popular and delusive fallacy of
emotional socialism which insists not so much that all shall share the
best of life, as that none shall escape its worst. The claim that all
shall be acquainted with every phase of life is enforced not by an
endeavor to make each reader a sharer in the joys and blessings of
existence, but by a determined thrusting forward of the pains and shames
of humanity. Modern literature has too generally made the profession of
treating all facts of life impartially a mere excuse for dealing
exclusively with whatever is ugly and degraded, and for dragging to
light whatever has been concealed. This is at best as if one used rare
cups of Venetian glass for the measuring out of commercial kerosene and
vinegar, or precious Grecian urns for the gathering up of the refuse of
the streets.
The wise student of literature will never lose sight of the fact that
fiction which has not in it an inspiration is to be looked upon as
ineffectual, if it is not to be avoided as morbid and unwholesome.
Fiction may be sad, it may deal with the darker side of existence; but
it should leave the reader with the uplift which comes from the
perception that there is in humanity the power to rise by elevation of
spirit above the bitterest blight, to triumph over the most cruel
circumstances which can befall.
One word must be added in conclusion, and that is the warning that
fiction can never take the place of actual life. There is danger in all
art that it may win men from interest in real existence. Literature is
after all but the interpreter of life, and living is more than all
imaginative experience. We need both the book and the deed to round out
a full and rich being. It is possible to abuse literature as it is
possible to abuse any other gift of the gods. It is not impossible to
stultify and benumb the mind by too much novel-reading; but of this
there is no need. Fiction properly used and enjoyed is one of the
greatest blessings of civilization; and how poor and thin and meagre
would life be without it!
XVI
POETRY
The lover of literature must approach any discussion of poetry with
feelings of mingled delight and dread. The subject is one which can
hardly fail to excite him to enthusiasm, but it is one with which it is
difficult to deal without a declaration of sentiments so strong that
they are not likely to be spoken; and it is one, too, upon which so much
has been said crudely and carelessly, or wisely and warmly, that any
writer must hesitate to add anything to the abundance of words already
spoken.
For there have been few things so voluminously discussed as poetry. It
is a theme so high that sages could not leave it unpraised; while there
is never a penny-a-liner so poor or so mean that he hesitates to write
his essay upon the sublime and beautiful art. It is one of the
consequences of human vanity that the more subtile and difficult a
matter, the more feeble minds feel called upon to cover it with the dust
of their empty phrases. The most crowded places are those where angels
fear to tread; and it is with reverence not unmixed with fear that any
true admirer ventures to speak even his love for the noble art of
poetry. No discussion of the study of literature, however, can leave
out of the account that which is literature's crown and glory; and of
the much that might be said and must be felt, an effort must be made
here to set something down.
* * * * *
There are few characteristics more general in the race of man than that
responsiveness to rhythm which is the foundation of the love of verse.
The sense of symmetry exists in the rudest savage that tattoos the two
sides of his face in the same pattern, or strings his necklace of shells
in alternating colors. The same feeling is shown by the unæsthetic
country matron, the mantel of whose sacredly dark and cold best room is
not to her eye properly adorned unless the ugly vase at one end is
balanced by another exactly similar ugly vase upon the other. In sound
the instinct is yet more strongly marked. The barbaric drum-beat which
tells in the quivering sunlight of an African noon that the
cannibalistic feast is preparing appeals crudely to the same quality of
the human mind which in its refinement responds to the swelling cadences
of Mendelssohn's Wedding March or the majestic measures of the Ninth
Symphony. The rhythm of the voice in symmetrically arranged words is
equally potent in its ability to give pleasure. Savage tribes make the
beginnings of literature in inchoate verse. Indeed, so strongly does
poetry appeal to men even in the earlier states of civilization that
Macaulay seems to have conceived the idea that poetry belongs to an
immature stage of growth,--a deduction not unlike supposing the sun to
be of no consequence to civilization because it has been worshiped by
savages. In the earlier phases of human development, whether of the
individual or of the race, the universal instincts are more apparent;
and the hold which song takes upon half-barbaric man is simply a proof
of how primal and universal is the taste to which it appeals. The sense
and enjoyment of rhythm show themselves in a hundred ways in the life
and pleasures of primitive races, the vigorous shoots from which is to
spring a splendid growth.
Not to go so far back as the dawn of civilization, however, it is
sufficient here to recall our own days in the nursery, when Mother
Goose, the only universal Alma Mater, with rhymes foolish but
rhythmical, meaningless but musical, delighted ears yet too untrained to
distinguish sense from folly, but not too young to enjoy the delight of
the beating of the voice in metrically arranged accents.
This pleasure in rhythm is persistent, and it is strongly marked even in
untrained minds. In natures unspoiled and healthy, natures not
bewildered and sophisticated by a false idea of cultivation, or deceived
into unsound notions of the real value of poetry, the taste remains
sound and good. In the youth of a race this natural enjoyment of verse
is gratified by folk-songs. These early forms are naturally undeveloped
and simple, but the lays are genuine and wholesome; they possess lasting
quality. Different peoples have in differing degrees the power of
appreciating verse, but I do not know that any race has been found to
lack it entirely. There is abundant evidence that the Anglo-Saxon and
Norman ancestors from whom sprang the English-speaking peoples were in
this respect richly endowed, and that they early went far in the
development of this power. The old ballads of our language are so rich
and so enduringly beautiful that we are proved to come from a stock
endowed with a rich susceptibility to poetry. If this taste has not been
generally developed it is from some reason other than racial incapacity.
Nothing need be looked for in early literatures sweeter and sounder than
the fine old ballads of "Chevy Chace," "Tamlane," "Sir Patrick Spens,"
or "Clerk Saunders." Many a later poet of no mean reputation has failed
to strike so deep and true a note as rings through these songs made by
forgotten minstrels for a ballad-loving people. There are not too many
English-speaking poets to-day who could match the cry of the wraith of
Clerk Saunders at the window of his love:--
Oh, cocks are crowing a merry midnight,
The wild fowls are boding day;
Give me my faith and troth again,
Let me fare on my way....
Cauld mould it is my covering now,
But and my winding sheet;
The dew it falls nae sooner down
Than my resting-place is weet!
How far popular taste has departed from an appreciation of verse that is
simple and genuine is shown by those favorite rhymes which are
unwearyingly yearned for in the columns of Notes and Queries, and which
reappear with periodic persistence in Answers to Correspondents. In
educated persons, it is true, there is still a love of what is really
good in verse, but it is far too rare. The general ear and the general
taste have become vitiated. There is a melancholy and an amazing number
of readers who are pleased only with rhymes of the sort of Will
Carleton's "Farm Ballads," the sentimentally inane jingles published in
the feminine domestic periodicals, and the rest of what might be called,
were not the phrase perilously near to the vulgar, the chewing-gum
school of verse.
One of the most serious defects in modern systems of education seems to
me to be, as has been said in an earlier talk, an insufficient provision
for the development of the imagination. This is nowhere more marked than
in the failure to recognize the place and importance of poetry in the
training of the mind of youth. It might be supposed that an age which
prides itself upon being scientific in its methods would be clever
enough to perceive that from the early stages of civilization may well
be taken hints for the development of the intellect of the young.
Primitive peoples have invariably nourished their growing intelligence
and enlarged their imagination by fairy-lore and poetry. The childhood
of the individual is in its essentials not widely dissimilar from the
childhood of the race; and what was the instinctive and wholesome food
for one is good for the other. If our common schools could but omit a
good deal of the instruction which is falsely called "practical,"
because it deals with material issues, and devote the time thus gained
to training children to enjoy poetry and to use their imagination, the
results would be incalculably better.[2]
[Footnote 2: I say to enjoy poetry. There is much well-meant instruction
which is unconsciously conducive to nothing but its detestation.
Students who by nature have a fondness for verse are laboriously trained
by conscientiously mistaken instructors to regard anything in poetical
form as a bore and a torment. The business of a teacher in a preparatory
school should be to incite the pupil to love poetry. It is better to
make a boy thrill and kindle over a single line than it is to get into
his head all the comments made on literature from the beginning of
time.]
The strain and stress of modern life are opposed to the appreciation of
any art; and in the case of poetry this difficulty has been increased by
a wide-spread feeling that poetry is after all of little real
consequence. It has been held to be an excrescence upon life rather than
an essential part of it. It is the tendency of the time to seek for
tangible and present results; and men have too generally ceased to
appreciate the fact that much which is best is to be reached more surely
indirectly than directly. Since of the effects which spring from poetry
those most of worth are its remote and intangible results, careless and
superficial thinkers have come to look upon song as an unmanly
affectation, a thing artificial if not effeminate. This is one of the
most absolute and vicious of all intellectual errors. In high and noble
truth, poetry is as natural as air; poetry is as virile as war!
It is not easy to discover whence arose the popular feeling of the
insignificance of poetry. It is allied to the materialistic undervaluing
of all art, and it is probably not unconnected with the ascetic idea
that whatever ministers to earthly delight is a hindrance to progress
toward the unseen life of another world. Something is to be attributed,
no doubt, to the contempt bred by worthless imitations with which facile
poetasters have afflicted a long-suffering world; but most of all is the
want of an appreciation of the value of poetry to be attributed to the
fact that men engrossed in literal and material concerns have not been
able to appreciate remote consequences, or to comprehend the utterances
of the masters who speak the language of the imagination.
While the world in general, however, has been increasingly unsympathetic
toward poetry, the sages have universally concurred in giving to it the
highest place in the list of literary achievements. "Poetry," Emerson
said, "is the only verity." The same thought is expanded in a passage
from Mrs. Browning, in which she speaks of poets as
--the only truth-tellers now left to God,--
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun-skirts, through conventual gray glooms;
The only teachers who instruct mankind
From just a shadow on a charnel wall
To find man's veritable stature out,
Erect, sublime,--the measure of a man.
--_Aurora Leigh_
So Wordsworth:--
Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, it is the
impassioned expression which is on the face of all science.
It is needless, however, to multiply quotations. The world has never
doubted the high respect which those who appreciate poetry have for the
art.
It is true also that however general at any time may have been the
seeming or real neglect of poetry, the race has not failed to preserve
its great poems. The prose of the past, no matter how great its wisdom,
has never been able to take with succeeding generations the rank held by
the masterpieces of the poets. Mankind has seemed not unlike one who
affects to hold his jewels in little esteem, it may be, yet like the
jewel owner it has guarded them with constant jealousy. The honor-roll
of literature is the world's list of great poets. The student of
literature is not long in discovering that his concern is far more
largely with verse than with anything else that the wit of mankind has
devised to write. However present neglect may at any time appear to show
the contrary, the long-abiding regard of the race declares beyond
peradventure that it counts poetry as most precious among all its
intellectual treasures.
XVII
THE TEXTURE OF POETRY
In discussing poetry it is once more necessary to begin with something
which will serve us as a definition. No man can imprison the essence of
an art in words; and it is not to be understood that a formal definition
can be framed which shall express all that poetry is and means. Its more
obvious characteristics, however, may be phrased, and even an incomplete
formula is often useful. There have been almost as many definitions of
poetry made already as there have been writers on literature, some
of them intelligible and some of them open to the charge of
incomprehensibility. Schopenhauer, for instance, defined poetry as the
art of exciting by words the power of the imagination; a phrase so broad
that it is easily made to cover all genuine literature. It will perhaps
be sufficient for our purpose here if we say that poetry is the
embodiment in metrical, imaginative language of passionate emotion.
By metrical language is meant that which is systematically rhythmical.
Much prose is rhythmical. Indeed it is difficult to conceive of fine or
delicate prose which has not rhythm to some degree, and oratorical prose
is usually distinguished by this. The Bible abounds in excellent
examples; as, for instance, this passage from Job:--
Hell is naked before Him, and destruction hath no covering; He
stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth
upon nothing. He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the
cloud is not rent under them. He holdeth back the face of His throne,
and spreadeth His cloud upon it. He hath compassed the waters with
bounds until the day and night come to an end. The pillars of heaven
tremble, and are astonished at His reproof. He divideth the sea with
His power, and by His understanding He smiteth through the
proud.--_Job_, xxvi. 6-12.
Here, as in all fine prose, there is a rhythm which is marked, and at
times almost regular; but it is not ordered by a system, as it must be
in the simplest verse of poetry. Take, by way of contrast, a stanza from
the superb chorus to Artemis in "Atalanta in Calydon:"--
Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
Maiden most perfect, lady of light,
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
With a clamor of waters and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendor and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.
Here the rhythm is systematized according to regular laws, and so
becomes metrical. The effect upon the ear in prose is largely due to
rhythm, but metrical effects are entirely within the province of poetry.
This difference between rhythmical and metrical language would seem to
be sufficiently obvious, but the difficulty which many students have in
appreciating it may make it worth while to give another illustration.
The following passage from Edmund Burke, that great master of sonorous
English, is strongly and finely rhythmical:--
Because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with
melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal
prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because
in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events
like these our passions instruct our reason; because when kings are
hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great drama,
and become objects of insult to the base, and of pity to the good, we
behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in
the physical order of things.--_Reflections on the Revolution in
France._
So markedly rhythmical is this, indeed, that it would take but little to
change it into metre:--
Because we are so made as to be moved by spectacles like these with
melancholy sentiments of the unstable case of mortal things, and the
uncertainty of human greatness here; because in those our natural
feelings we may learn great lessons too; because in such events our
passions teach our reason well; because when kings are hurled down
from their thrones, etc.
There is no longer any dignity in this. It has become a sort of
sing-song, neither prose nor yet poetry. The sentiments are not unlike
those of a familiar passage in Shakespeare:--
This is the state of man; to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him:
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;
And,--when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a ripening,--nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do.
_Henry VIII._, iii. 2.
In the extract from Burke a sense of weakness and even of flatness is
produced by the rearrangement of the accents so that they are made
regular; while in the verse of Shakespeare the sensitive ear is very
likely troubled by the single misplaced accent in the first line. In any
mood save the poetic metre seems an artificiality and an affectation,
but in that mood it is as natural and as necessary as air to the lungs.
Besides being metrical the language of poetry must be imaginative. By
imaginative language is meant that which not only conveys imaginative
conceptions, but which is itself full of force and suggestion; language
which not only expresses ideas and emotions, but which by its own power
evokes them. Imaginative language is marked by the most vivid perception
on the part of the writer of the connotive effect of words; it conveys
even more by implication than by direct denotation. It may of course be
used in poetry or prose. In the passage from Job just quoted, the use of
such phrases as "empty place," "hangeth the earth upon nothing," convey
more by what they suggest to the mind than by their literal assertion.
The writer has evidently used them with a vital and vivid understanding
of their suggestiveness. He realizes to the full their office to convey
impressions so subtle that they cannot be given by direct and literal
diction.
Poetry is made up of words and phrases which glow with this richness of
intention. When Shakespeare speaks of skin "smooth as monumental
alabaster," how much is added to the idea by the epithet "monumental,"
the suggestion of the polished and protected stone, enshrined on a tomb;
how much is due to association and implication in such phrases as the
"reverberate hills," "parting is such sweet sorrow," "the white wonder
of dear Juliet's hand," "and sleep in dull, cold marble,"--phrases all
of which have a literal significance plain enough, yet of which this
literal meaning is of small account beside that which they evoke. Poetic
diction naturally and inevitably melts into figures, as when we read of
"the shade of melancholy boughs," "the spendthrift sun," "the bubble
reputation," "the inaudible and noiseless foot of time;" but the point
here is that even in its literal words there is constantly the sense and
the employment of implied meanings. It is by no means necessarily
figures to which language owes the quality of being imaginative. Broadly
speaking, a style may be said to be imaginative in proportion as the
writer has realized and intended its suggestions.
The language of prose is often imaginative to a high degree, but seldom
if ever to that extent or with that deliberate purpose which in verse is
nothing less than essential. Genuine poetry differs from prose in the
entire texture of its web. From the same threads the loom may weave
plain stuff or richest brocade; and thus of much the same words are made
prose and poetry. The difference lies chiefly in the fashion of working.