“What is his idea?—what thought does he express?” asks—rather loftily—a
distinguished critic and professor of English literature to whom I
submitted a brief poem of Mr. Loveman. I had not known that Mr. Loveman
(of whom, by the way, I have not heard so much as I expect to) had
tried to express a thought; I had supposed that his aim was to produce
an emotion, a feeling. That is all that a poet—as a poet—can do. He
may be philosopher as well as poet—may have a thought, as profound a
thought as you please, but if he do not express it so as to produce an
emotion in an emotional mind he has not spoken as a poet speaks. It is
the philosopher’s trade to make us think, the poet’s to make us feel.
If he is so fortunate as to have his thought, well and good; he can
make us feel, with it as well as without—and without it as well as with.
One would not care to give up the philosophy that underruns so much of
Shakspeare’s work, but how little its occasional absence affects our
delight is shown by the reading of such “nonsense verses” as the song
in a “As You Like It,” beginning:
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino.
One does not need the music; the lines sing themselves, and are full of
the very spirit of poetry. What the dickens they may chance to mean is
quite another matter. What is poetry, anyhow, but “glorious nonsense”?
But how very glorious the nonsense happens to be! What “thought” did
Ariel try to express in his songs in “The Tempest”? There is hardly
the tenth part of a thought in them; yet who that has a rudimentary,
or even a vestigial, susceptibility to sentiment and feeling, can
read them without the thrill that is stubborn to the summoning of the
profoundest reflections of Hamlet in his inkiest cloak?
Poetry may be conjoined with thought. In the great poets it commonly
is—that is to say, we award the palm to him who is great in more than
one direction. But the poetry is a thing apart from the thought and
demanding a separate consideration. The two have no more essential
connection than the temple and its granite, the statue and its bronze.
Is the sculptor’s work less great in the clay than it becomes in the
hands of the foundry man?
No one, not the greatest poet nor the dullest critic, knows what
poetry is. No man, from Milton down to the acutest and most
pernicious lexicographer, has been able to define its name. To catch
that butterfly the critic’s net is not fine enough by much. Like
electricity, it is felt, not known. If it could be known, if the secret
were accessible to analysis, why, one could be taught to write poetry
without having been “born unto singing.”
So it happens that the most penetrating criticism must leave eternally
unsaid the thing that is most worth saying. We can say of a poem as
of a picture, an Ionic column, or any work of art: “It is charming!”
But why and how it charms—there we are dumb, its creator no less than
another.
What is it in art before which all but the unconscious peasant and the
impenitent critic confess the futility of speech? Why does a certain
disposition of words affect us deeply when if differently arranged to
mean the same thing they stir no emotion whatever? He who can answer
that has surprised the secret of the Sphinx, and after him shall be no
more poetry forever!
Expound who is able the charm of these lines from “Kubla Khan:”
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw.
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
There is no “thought” here—nothing but the baldest narrative in common
words arranged in their natural order; but upon whose heart-strings
does not that maiden play?—and who does not adore her?
Like the entire poem of which they are a part, and like the entire
product of which the poem is a part, the lines are all imagination
and emotion. They address, not the intellect, but the heart. Let the
analyst of poetry wrestle with them if he is eager to be thrown.
1903.