“Vermilion wings, by distance held
To pause aflight while fleeting swift,
And high aloft the pearl inshelled
Her lucid glow in glow will lift.”
Does not the reading of such lines set one’s head in a whirl?
The impression of novelty can never be made by a trick in the use
of language, nor can the sense of mystery be given by obscurity of
expression. Veils and screens and dim lights may do it in the world of
sense, but not in the world of ideas. The reader feels all the time
that there is something in the way, and that he would see clearly if
the writer thought clearly. Freshness and novelty are the gifts of the
writer whose mind is fresh and who has lively and novel emotions in the
presence of everyday things and events.
There is a sense of mystery in much of the poetry of Wordsworth and
Tennyson, and in our own Emerson and Whitman, but little or none
of the Meredithian blur and opacity. One may not at once catch the
full meaning of Wordsworth’s “Ode to Immortality,” or Tennyson’s
“Tiresias” or “Ancient Sage,” or Emerson’s “Brahma,” or Whitman’s
“Sleep Chasings,” but how transparent the language, how unequivocal
the emotion, how direct and solid the expression! There is a vast
difference between the impression or want of impression made by a
commonplace thought veiled and hidden by ambiguity of phrase, and
that made by “something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is
the light of setting suns.” Great poets give us a sense of depth and
height, of the far and the rare. Meredith does at times, but oftener he
gives us only a sense of the dense and the foggy.
There are two reasons why we may not understand a man. In one case the
fault is in him,--in his clouded and ambiguous way of thinking, such
as I have already spoken of. In the other case the fault, or rather
the difficulty, is in us. The man may live and move upon a different
spiritual plane, he may have an atmosphere and cherish ideals that
belong to another world than ours. Thus the solid men of Boston did not
understand Emerson, but said their daughters did. The daughters were
habitually more familiar with Emerson’s ideal values than the fathers
were. Thus Scott said he did not understand Wordsworth, could not
follow his “abstruse ideas;” Campbell suited him better. Scott belonged
to another type of mind than that of Wordsworth’s, lived in another
world. There was no sense of mystery in his mind,--of that haunting,
elusive something which Wordsworth felt in all outward nature. There
was no religion in Scott’s love of nature, and it is this probably
that baffled him in Wordsworth. Both were born countrymen and equal
lovers of common, rural things, but Wordsworth associated them with
his spiritual and ideal joys and experiences, while Scott found in
them an appeal to his copious animal spirits, and his love of sensuous
beauty. Wordsworth would understand Scott much better than Scott would
understand Wordsworth. The ancient poets probably would not understand
the moderns nearly as well as the moderns understand the ancients. We
are further along on the road of human experience.
Then, we may understand a work and not appreciate it, not respond to
its appeal. Appreciation is based upon kinship. We are more in sympathy
with some types of mind than with others of equal parts. The most
impersonal and judicious of critics cannot escape the law of elective
affinities. Some books _find_ us more than others of similar merit.
See how people differ, and are bound to differ, about Whitman, and
it is because his aim is not merely to give the reader poetic truth
disassociated from all personal qualities and traits, but to give him
himself. We cannot separate the poet from the man, and if we do not
respond to the man, to his type, to his quality, to his wholesale and
radical democracy, we shall not respond to the poet. If we all read
authors only through our taste in _belles lettres_, through our love of
literary truth, we should agree in our estimate of them according as
our tastes agreed. But the feeling we bring to them is very complex.
Character, predisposition, natural affinities, race traits, all play
a part. We are very apt to agree about such a poet as Milton, because
the personal element plays so small a part in his poetry. If we do not
get poetic truth in him we do not get anything. His style is the main
thing, as it is with the Greek poets. In other words, there is nothing
in Milton that makes a personal appeal. One cannot conceive of any
reader taking him to his heart, appropriating him, and finding his life
colored and changed by him, as by some later poets. Wordsworth was a
revelation to Mill; Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman have in the same
way been revelations to many readers, and for the same reason,--their
intense individual point of view. Their appeal is a personal and a
religious one as well as a poetic. No one who has not something of
the modern pantheistic feeling toward nature will be deeply touched
by Wordsworth. No one who has not felt the burden of modern problems,
the decay of the old faiths, will be moved by Arnold’s poetry. His
“sad lucidity of soul” belongs to our age. No one who has not broken
away from the old traditions in art and religion and in politics, and
possessed himself emotionally of the point of view afforded by modern
science, will make much of Whitman. Without a certain mental and
spiritual experience and a certain stamp of mind Emerson will not be
much to you. In Poe one’s sense of artistic forms and verbal melody are
alone appealed to. He is more to a Frenchman than to an American. If
you are ahungered for the bread of life do not go to Poe, do not go to
Landor or to Milton, do not go to the current French poets. Go sooner
to Goethe, to Tennyson, to Browning, to Arnold, to Whitman,--the great
personal poets, the men who have spiritual and religious values as
well as poetic. All the great imaginative writers of our century have
felt, more or less, the stir and fever of the century, and have been
its priests and prophets. The lesser poets have not felt these things.
Had Poe been greater or broader he would have felt them, so would
Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to touch the formative currents of
our social or religious or national life. In the past the great artist
has always been at ease in Zion; in our day only the lesser artists
are at ease, unless we except Whitman, man of unshaken faith, who is
absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the breadth
of his vision and the depth and universality of his sympathies.