New editions of books are a venture for publishers rather than authors.
The author has committed his rash act once for all at the beginning and
he can hardly retract or repeat it. Nevertheless if I had not connived
and collaborated at this selection of verses written (almost all of
them) in my younger days, they probably would not have reappeared.
I therefore owe an apology to my best critics and friends, who have
always warned me that I am no poet; all the more since, in the sense in
which they mean the word, I heartily agree with them. Of impassioned
tenderness or Dionysiac frenzy I have nothing, nor even of that magic
and pregnancy of phrasere--ally the creation of a fresh idiom--which
marks the high lights of poetry. Even if my temperament had been
naturally warmer, the fact that the English language (and I can write
no other with assurance) was not my mother-tongue would of itself
preclude any inspired use of it on my part; its roots do not quite
reach to my centre. I never drank in in childhood the homely cadences
and ditties which in pure spontaneous poetry set the essential key.
I know no words redolent of the wonder-world, the fairy-tale, or the
cradle. Moreover, I am city-bred, and that companionship with nature,
those rural notes, which for English poets are almost inseparable
from poetic feeling, fail me altogether. Landscape to me is only a
background for fable or a symbol for fate, as it was to the ancients;
and the human scene itself is but a theme for reflection. Nor have
I been tempted into the by-ways even of towns, or fascinated by the
aspect and humours of all sorts and conditions of men. My approach to
language is literary, my images are only metaphors, and sometimes it
seems to me that I resemble my countryman Don Quixote, when in his airy
flights he was merely perched on a high horse and a wooden Pegasus; and
I ask myself if I ever had anything to say in verse that might not have
been said better in prose.
And yet, in reality, there was no such alternative. What I felt when
I composed those verses could not have been rendered in any other
form. Their sincerity is absolute, not only in respect to the thought
which might be abstracted from them and expressed in prose, but also
in respect to the aura of literary and religious associations which
envelops them. If their prosody is worn and traditional, like a
liturgy, it is because they represent the initiation of a mind into
a world older and larger than itself; not the chance experiences of
a stray individual, but his submission to what is not his chance
experience; to the truth of nature and the moral heritage of mankind.
Here is the uncertain hand of an apprentice, but of an apprentice in a
great school. Verse is one of the traditions of literature. Like the
orders of Greek architecture, the sonnet or the couplet or the quatrain
are better than anything else that has been devised to serve the same
function; and the innate freedom of poets to hazard new forms does not
abolish the freedom of all men to adopt the old ones. It is almost
inevitable that a man of letters, if his mind is cultivated and capable
of moral concentration, should versify occasionally, or should have
versified. He need not on that account pose as a poetic genius, and yet
his verses (like those of Michael Angelo, for instance) may form a
part, even if a subordinate part, of the expression of his mind. Poetry
was made for man, not man for poetry, and there are really as many
kinds of it as there are poets, or even verses. Is Hamlet's Soliloquy
poetry? Would it have conveyed its meaning better if not reined in by
the metre, and made to prance and turn to the cadences of blank verse?
Whether better or worse, it would certainly not be itself without
that movement. Versification is like a pulsing accompaniment, somehow
sustaining and exalting the clear logic of the words. The accompaniment
may be orchestral, but it is not necessarily worse for being thrummed
on a mandolin or a guitar. So the couplets of Pope or Dryden need not
be called poetry, but they could not have been prose. They frame in
a picture, balanced like the dance. There is an elevation, too, in
poetic diction, just because it is consecrated and archaic; a pomp
as of a religious procession, without which certain intuitions would
lose all their grace and dignity. Borrowed plumes would not even seem
an ornament if they were not in themselves beautiful. To say that
what was good once is good no longer is to give too much importance
to chronology. Æsthetic fashions may change, losing as much beauty
at one end as they gain at the other, but innate taste continues to
recognise its affinities, however remote, and need never change. Mask
and buskin are often requisite in order to transport what is great in
human experience out of its embosoming littleness. They are inseparable
from finality, from perception of the ultimate. Perhaps it is just this
tragic finality that English poets do not have and do not relish: they
feel it to be rhetorical. But verse after all is a form of rhetoric, as
is all speech and even thought; a means of pouring experience into a
mould which fluid experience cannot supply, and of transmuting emotion
into ideas, by making it articulate.
In one sense I think that my verses, mental and thin as their texture
may be, represent a true inspiration, a true docility. A Muse? not
exactly an English Muse--actually visited me in my isolation; the same,
or a ghost of the same, that visited Boethius or Alfred de Musset or
Leopardi. It was literally impossible for me then not to re-echo her
eloquence. When that compulsion ceased, I ceased to write verses. My
emotion--for there was genuine emotion--faded into a sense that my
lesson was learned and my troth plighted; there was no longer any
occasion for this sort of breathlessness and unction. I think the
discerning reader will probably prefer the later prose versions of my
philosophy; I prefer them myself, as being more broadly based, saner,
more humorous. Yet if he is curious in the matter he may find the
same thing here nearer to its fountain-head, in its accidental early
setting, and with its most authentic personal note.
For as to the subject of these poems, it is simply my philosophy
in the making. I should not give the title of philosopher to every
logician or psychologist who, in his official and studious moments,
may weigh argument against argument or may devise expedients for
solving theoretical puzzles. I see no reason why a philosopher should
be puzzled. What he sees he sees; of the rest he is ignorant; and his
sense of this vast ignorance (which is his natural and inevitable
condition) is a chief part of his knowledge and of his emotion.
Philosophy is not an optional theme that may occupy him on occasion. It
is his only possible life, his daily response to everything. He lives
by thinking, and his one perpetual emotion is that this world, with
himself in it, should be the strange world which it is. Everything
he thinks or utters will accordingly be an integral part of his
philosophy, whether it be called poetry or science or criticism. The
verses of a philosopher will be essentially epigrams, like those which
the Greek sages composed; they will moralise the spectacle, whether it
be some personal passion or some larger aspect of nature.
My own moral philosophy, especially as expressed in this more
sentimental form, may not seem very robust or joyous. Its fortitude
and happiness are those of but one type of soul. The owl hooting from
his wintry bough cannot be chanticleer crowing in the barnyard, yet he
is sacred to Minerva; and the universal poet, who can sing the humours
of winter no less lustily than those of spring, may even speak of his
"merry note," worthy to mingle with the other pleasant accidents of the
somberer season,
When icicles hang by the wall,
. . . . . .
And coughing drowns the parson's saw.
But whether the note seem merry or sad, musical or uncouth, it is
itself a note of nature; and it may at least be commended, seeing it
conveys a philosophy, for not conveying it by argument, but frankly
making confession of an actual spiritual experience, addressed only to
those whose ear it may strike sympathetically and who, crossing the
same dark wood on their own errands, may pause for a moment to listen
gladly.