There is--at least, there seems to be--more cant talked about poetry just
now than at any previous time. Tartuffe is to-day not a priest but a
poet--or a critic. Or, perhaps, Tartuffe is too lively a prototype for the
curates of poetry who swarm in the world's capitals at the present hour.
There is a tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it on
the world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing. In medicine,
as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into which the members
can retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate. In the same way, the
theologians took possession of the temple of religion and refused
admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. This
largely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority over
other men. Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit--joyless and
domineering. Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is a
denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons.
All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of
the immortal souls against the superior persons. Religion, the reformers
have proclaimed, is the common possession of mankind. Christ came into the
world not to afford a career to theological pedants, but that the mass of
mankind might have life and might have it more abundantly.
Poetry is in constant danger of suffering the same fate as religion. In
the great ages of poetry, poetry was what is called a popular subject. The
greatest poets, both of Greece and of England, took their genius to that
extremely popular institution, the theatre. They wrote not for pedants or
any exclusive circle, but for mankind. They were, we have reason to
believe, under no illusions as to the imperfections of mankind. But it was
the best audience they could get, and represented more or less the same
kind of world that they found in their own bosoms. It is a difficult thing
to prove that the ordinary man can appreciate poetry, just as it is a
difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man has an immortal soul. But
the great poets, like the great saints, gave him the benefit of the doubt.
If they had not, we should not have had the Greek drama or Shakespeare.
That they were right seems probable in view of the excellence of the poems
and songs that survive among a peasantry that has not been de-educated in
the schools. If the arts were not a natural inheritance of simple people,
neither the Irish love-songs collected by Dr. Douglas Hyde nor the Irish
music edited by Moore could have survived. I do not mean to suggest that
any art can be kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet,
the singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily alive
without the popular audience. Tolstoy's use of the unspoiled peasant as
the test of art may lead to absurdities, if carried too far. But at least
it is an error in the right direction. It is an affirmation of the fact
that every man is potentially an artist just as Christianity is an
affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially a saint. It is also
an affirmation of the fact that art, like religion, makes its appeal to
feelings which are shared by the mass of men rather than the feelings
which are the exclusive possession of the few. Where Tolstoy made his
chief mistake was in failing to see that the artistic sense, like the
religious sense, is something that, so far from being born perfect, even
in the unspoiled peasant, passes though stage after stage of labour and
experience on the way to perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed:
he is not an artist in the flower. He may pass all his life without ever
coming to flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universal
potentiality of beauty. Tolstoy's most astounding paradox came _to_
nothing more than this--that art exists, not for the hundreds of people
who are artists in name, but for the millions of people who are artists in
embryo.
At the same time, there is no use in being too confident that the average
man will ever be a poet, even in the sense of being a reader of poetry.
All that one can ask is that the doors of literature shall be thrown open
to him, as the doors of religion are in spite of the fact that he is not a
perfect saint. The histories of literature and religion, it seems likely,
both go back to a time in which men expressed their most rapturous
emotions in dances. In time the inarticulate shouts of the
dancers--Scottish dancers still utter those shouts, do they not?--gave
place to rhythmic words. It may have been the genius of a single dancer
that first broke into speech, but his genius consisted not so much in his
separateness from the others as in his power to express what all the
others felt. He was the prophet of a rapture that was theirs as much as
his own.
Men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order to
liberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember things. Poetry
has a double origin in joy and utility. The "Thirty days hath September"
rhyme of the English child suggests the way in which men must have turned
to verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial
wisdom, of legend and narrative. Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from his _New
Study of English Poetry_, would deny the name of poetry to all verse that
is not descended from the choric dance. In my opinion it is better to
recognize the two lines, as of the father and the mother, in the pedigree
of poetry. We find abundant traces of them not only in Hesiod and Virgil,
but in Homer and Chaucer. The utility of form and the joy of form have in
all these poets become inextricably united. The objection to most of the
"free verse" that is being written to-day is that in form it is neither
delightful nor memorable. The truth is, the memorableness of the writings
of a man of genius becomes a part of their delight. If Pope is a
delightful writer it is not merely because he expressed interesting
opinions; it is because he threw most of the energies of his being into
the task of making them memorable and gave them a heightened vitality by
giving them rhymes. His satires and _The Rape of the Lock_ are, no doubt,
better poetry than the _Essay on Man_, because he poured into them a still
more vivid energy. But I doubt if there is any reasonable definition of
poetry which would exclude even Pope the "essayist" from the circle of the
poets. He was a puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they are
to-day, of all shapes and sizes.
Unfortunately, "poetry," like "religion," is a word that we are almost
bound to use in several senses. Sometimes we speak of "poetry" in
contradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry.
Similarly, "religion" would in one sense include the Abode of Love as
opposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the Abode of
Love as opposed to the religion of St. James. In a common-sense
classification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind of literature
written in verse or in rhythms akin to verse. Sir Thomas Browne may have
been more poetic than Erasmus Darwin, but in his best work he did not
write poetry. Erasmus Darwin may have been more prosaic than Sir Thomas
Browne, but in his most famous work he did not write prose. Sir Henry
Newbolt will not permit a classification of this kind. For him poetry is
an expression of intuitions--an emotional transfiguration of life--while
prose is the expression of a scientific fact or a judgment. I doubt if
this division is defensible. Everything that is literature is, in a sense,
poetry as opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a great
deal of work that is preponderantly the result of observation and
judgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly imaginative.
Poetry is a house of many mansions. It includes fine poetry and foolish
poetry, noble poetry and base poetry. The chief duty of criticism is the
praise--the infectious praise--of the greatest poetry. The critic has the
right to demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a noble
transfiguration of life. Swinburne transfigures life in _Anactoria_ no
less than Shakespeare transfigures it in _King Lear_. But Swinburne's is
an ignoble, Shakespeare's a noble transfiguration. Poetry may be divine or
devilish, just as religion may be. Literary criticism is so timid of being
accused of Puritanism that it is chary of admitting that there may be a
Heaven and a Hell of poetic genius as well as of religious genius. The
moralists go too far on the other side and are tempted to judge literature
by its morality rather than by its genius. It seems more reasonable to
conclude that it is possible to have a poet of genius who is nevertheless
a false poet, just as it is possible to have a prophet of genius who is
nevertheless a false prophet. The lover of literature will be interested
in them all, but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to the
fact that the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well as
aesthetically, great. If Shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of the
Elizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the greatest;
it is also because he had a soul incomparably noble and generous. Sir
Henry Newbolt deals in an interesting way with this ennoblement of life
that is the mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox
code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the
path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate
egotism.
The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treats
poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must be
able to meet the challenge to its right to exist. The extreme moralist
would deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to make
men more moral. The hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure. The
greatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of the
extreme moralist or of the hedonist. Poetry exists for the purpose of
delivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure. It exists for the
purpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this
scene of wonder, beauty and terror. It is consonant both with the world of
good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and an
enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth and
heaven. Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost always
fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away so
resolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula.
Poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by the
home-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world. But it must always use
the life we live as the material of its joyous vision. It is born of our
double attachment to Earth and to Paradise. There is no formula for
absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it in
the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. It is open to
question whether