He dips into the chaos that underlies the rational shell of the world
and brings up some superfluous image, some emotion dropped by the
way, and reattaches it to the present object; he reinstates things
unnecessary, he emphasizes things ignored, he paints in again into
the landscape the tints which the intellect has allowed to fade from
it. If he seems sometimes to obscure a fact, it is only because he is
restoring an experience. We may observe this process in the simplest
cases. When Ossian, mentioning the sun, says it is round as the shield
of his fathers, the expression is poetical. Why? Because he has added
to the word sun, in itself sufficient and unequivocal, other words,
unnecessary for practical clearness, but serving to restore the
individuality of his perception and its associations in his mind.
There is no square sun with which the sun he is speaking of could be
confused; to stop and call it round is a luxury, a halting in the
sensation for the love of its form. And to go on to tell us, what is
wholly impertinent, that the shield of his fathers was round also, is
to invite us to follow the chance wanderings of his fancy, to give us
a little glimpse of the stuffing of his own brain, or, we might almost
say, to turn over the pattern of his embroidery and show us the loose
threads hanging out on the wrong side. Such an escapade disturbs and
interrupts the true vision of the object, and a great poet, rising to
a perfect conception of the sun and forgetting himself, would have
disdained to make it; but it has a romantic and pathological interest,
it restores an experience, and is in that measure poetical. We have
been made to halt at the sensation, and to penetrate for a moment into
its background of dream.
But it is not only thoughts or images that the poet draws in this
way from the store of his experience, to clothe the bare form of
conventional objects: he often adds to these objects a more subtle
ornament, drawn from the same source. For the first element which the
intellect rejects in forming its ideas of things is the emotion which
accompanies the perception; and this emotion is the first thing the
poet restores. He stops at the image, because he stops to enjoy. He
wanders into the by-paths of association because the by-paths are
delightful. The love of beauty which made him give measure and cadence
to his words, the love of harmony which made him rhyme them, reappear
in his imagination and make him select there also the material that
is itself beautiful, or capable of assuming beautiful forms. The link
that binds together the ideas, sometimes so wide apart, which his wit
assimilates, is most often the link of emotion; they have in common
some element of beauty or of horror.
The poet's art is to a great extent the art of intensifying emotions
by assembling the scattered objects that naturally arouse them. He
sees the affinities of things by seeing their common affinities with
passion. As the guiding principle of practical thinking is some
interest, so that only what is pertinent to that interest is selected
by the attention; as the guiding principle of scientific thinking
is some connection of things in time or space, or some identity of
law; so in poetic thinking the guiding principle is often a mood or a
quality of sentiment. By this union of disparate things having a common
overtone of feeling, the feeling is itself evoked in all its strength;
nay, it is often created for the first time, much as by a new mixture
of old pigments Perugino could produce the unprecedented limpidity of
his colour, or Titian the unprecedented glow of his. Poets can thus
arouse sentiments finer than any which they have known, and in the act
of composition become discoverers of new realms of delightfulness and
grief. Expression is a misleading term which suggests that something
previously known is rendered or imitated; whereas the expression is
itself an original fact, the values of which are then referred to
the thing expressed, much as the honours of a Chinese mandarin are
attributed retroactively to his parents. So the charm which a poet, by
his art of combining images and shades of emotion, casts over a scene
or an action, is attached to the principal actor in it, who gets the
benefit of the setting furnished him by a well-stocked mind.
The poet is himself subject to this illusion, and a great part of what
is called poetry, although by no means the best part of it, consists
in this sort of idealization by proxy. We dye the world of our own
colour; by a pathetic fallacy, by a false projection of sentiment,
we soak Nature with our own feeling, and then celebrate her tender
sympathy with our moral being. This aberration, as we see in the case
of Wordsworth, is not inconsistent with a high development of both
the faculties which it confuses,--I mean vision and feeling. On the
contrary, vision and feeling, when most abundant and original, most
easily present themselves in this undivided form. There would be need
of a force of intellect which poets rarely possess to rationalize their
inspiration without diminishing its volume: and if, as is commonly the
case, the energy of the dream and the passion in them is greater than
that of the reason, and they cannot attain true propriety and supreme
beauty in their works, they can, nevertheless, fill them with lovely
images and a fine moral spirit.
The pouring forth of both perceptive and emotional elements in their
mixed and indiscriminate form gives to this kind of imagination the
directness and truth which sensuous poetry possesses on a lower level.
The outer world bathed in the hues of human feeling, the inner world
expressed in the forms of things,--that is the primitive condition of
both before intelligence and the prosaic classification of objects have
abstracted them and assigned them to their respective spheres. Such
identifications, on which a certain kind of metaphysics prides itself
also, are not discoveries of profound genius; they are exactly like
the observation of Ossian that the sun is round and that the shield of
his fathers was round too; they are disintegrations of conventional
objects, so that the original associates of our perceptions reappear;
then the thing and the emotion which chanced to be simultaneous
are said to be one, and we return, unless a better principle of
organization is substituted for the principle abandoned, to the
chaos of a passive animal consciousness, where all is mixed together,
projected together, and felt as an unutterable whole.
The pathetic fallacy is a return to that early habit of thought by
which our ancestors peopled the world with benevolent and malevolent
spirits; what they felt in the presence of objects they took to be a
part of the objects themselves. In returning to this natural confusion,
poetry does us a service in that she recalls and consecrates those
phases of our experience which, as useless to the understanding of
material reality, we are in danger of forgetting altogether. Therein
is her vitality, for she pierces to the quick and shakes us out of our
servile speech and imaginative poverty; she reminds us of all we have
felt, she invites us even to dream a little, to nurse the wonderful
spontaneous creations which at every waking moment we are snuffing out
in our brain. And the indulgence is no mere momentary pleasure; much
of its exuberance clings afterward to our ideas; we see the more and
feel the more for that exercise; we are capable of finding greater
entertainment in the common aspects of Nature and life. When the veil
of convention is once removed from our eyes by the poet, we are better
able to dominate any particular experience and, as it were, to change
its scale, now losing ourselves in its infinitesimal texture, now in
its infinite ramifications.
If the function of poetry, however, did not go beyond this recovery
of sensuous and imaginative freedom, at the expense of disrupting our
useful habits of thought, we might be grateful to it for occasionally
relieving our numbness, but we should have to admit that it was nothing
but a relaxation; that spiritual discipline was not to be gained from
it in any degree, but must be sought wholly in that intellectual
system that builds the science of Nature with the categories of prose.
So conceived, poetry would deserve the judgment passed by Plato on
all the arts of flattery and entertainment; it might be crowned as
delightful, but must be either banished altogether as meretricious
or at least confined to a few forms and occasions where it might do
little harm. The judgment of Plato has been generally condemned by
philosophers, although it is eminently rational, and justified by the
simplest principles of morals. It has been adopted instead, although
unwittingly, by the practical and secular part of mankind, who look
upon artists and poets as inefficient and brain-sick people under whose
spell it would be a serious calamity to fall, although they may be
called in on feast days as an ornament and luxury together with the
cooks, hairdressers, and florists.
Several circumstances, however, might suggest to us the possibility
that the greatest function of poetry may be still to find. Plato,
while condemning Homer, was a kind of poet himself; his quarrel with
the followers of the Muse was not a quarrel with the goddess; and
the good people of Philistia, distrustful as they may be of profane
art, pay undoubting honour to religion, which is a kind of poetry
as much removed from their sphere as the midnight revels upon Mount
Citheron, which, to be sure, were also religious in their inspiration.
Why, we may ask, these apparent inconsistencies? Why do our practical
men make room for religion in the background of their world? Why did
Plato, after banishing the poets, poetize the universe in his prose?
Because the abstraction by which the world of science and of practice
is drawn out of our experience, is too violent to satisfy even the
thoughtless and vulgar; the ideality of the machine we call Nature,
the conventionality of the drama we call the world, are too glaring
not to be somehow perceived by all. Each must sometimes fall back upon
the soul; he must challenge this apparition with the thought of death;
he must ask himself for the mainspring and value of his life. He will
then remember his stifled loves; he will feel that only his illusions
have ever given him a sense of reality, only his passions the hope and
the vision of peace. He will read himself through and almost gather a
meaning from his experience; at least he will half believe that all
he has been dealing with was a dream and a symbol, and raise his eyes
toward the truth beyond.
This plastic moment of the mind, when we become aware of the
artificiality and inadequacy of what common sense perceives, is the
true moment of poetic opportunity,--an opportunity, we may hasten
to confess, which is generally missed. The strain of attention, the
concentration and focussing of thought on the unfamiliar immediacy
of things, usually brings about nothing but confusion. We are dazed,
we are filled with a sense of unutterable things, luminous yet
indistinguishable, many yet one. Instead of rising to imagination, we
sink into mysticism.
To accomplish a mystical disintegration is not the function of any art;
if any art seems to accomplish it, the effect is only incidental, being
involved, perhaps, in the process of constructing the proper object of
that art, as we might cut down trees and dig them up by the roots to
lay the foundations of a temple. For every art looks to the building
up of something. And just because the world built up by common sense
and natural science is an inadequate world (a skeleton which needs the
filling of sensation before it can live), therefore the moment when we
realize its inadequacy is the moment when the higher arts find their
opportunity. When the world is shattered to bits they can come and
"build it nearer to the heart's desire."
The great function of poetry, which we have not yet directly mentioned,
is precisely this: to repair to the material of experience, seizing
hold of the reality of sensation and fancy beneath the surface of
conventional ideas, and then out of that living but indefinite
material to build new structures, richer, finer, fitter to the primary
tendencies of our nature, truer to the ultimate possibilities of the
soul. Our descent into the elements of our being is then justified by
our subsequent freer ascent toward its goal; we revert to sense only to
find food for reason; we destroy conventions only to construct ideals.
Such analysis for the sake of creation is the essence of all great
poetry. Science and common sense are themselves in their way poets of
no mean order, since they take the material of experience and make out
of it a clear, symmetrical, and beautiful world; the very propriety of
this art, however, has made it common. Its figures have become mere
rhetoric and its metaphors prose. Yet, even as it is, a scientific and
mathematical vision has a higher beauty than the irrational poetry of
sensation and impulse, which merely tickles the brain, like liquor,
and plays upon our random, imaginative lusts. The imagination of a
great poet, on the contrary, is as orderly as that of an astronomer,
and as large; he has the naturalist's patience, the naturalist's love
of detail and eye trained to see fine gradations and essential lines;
he knows no hurry; he has no pose, no sense of originality; he finds
his effects in his subject, and his subject in his inevitable world.
Resembling the naturalist in all this, he differs from him in the
balance of his interests; the poet has the concreter mind; his visible
world wears all its colours and retains its indwelling passion and
life. Instead of studying in experience its calculable elements, he
studies its moral values, its beauty, the openings it offers to the
soul: and the cosmos he constructs is accordingly an ideal theatre for
the spirit in which its noblest potential drama is enacted and its
destiny resolved.
This supreme function of poetry is only the consummation of the method
by which words and imagery are transformed into verse. As verse breaks
up the prosaic order of syllables and subjects them to a recognizable
and pleasing measure, so poetry breaks up the whole prosaic picture
of experience to introduce into it a rhythm more congenial and
intelligible to the mind. And in both these cases the operation is
essentially the same as that by which, in an intermediate sphere, the
images rejected by practical thought, and the emotions ignored by
it, are so marshalled as to fill the mind with a truer and intenser
consciousness of its memorable experience. The poetry of fancy, of
observation, and of passion moves on this intermediate level; the
poetry of mere sound and virtuosity is confined to the lower sphere;
and the highest is reserved for the poetry of the creative reason. But
one principle is present throughout,--the principle of Beauty,--the art
of assimilating phenomena, whether words, images, emotions, or systems
of ideas, to the deeper innate cravings of the mind.
Let us now dwell a little on this higher function of poetry and try to
distinguish some of its phases.
The creation of characters is what many of us might at first be
tempted to regard as the supreme triumph of the imagination. If we
abstract, however, from our personal tastes and look at the matter
in its human and logical relations, we shall see, I think, that the
construction of characters is not the ultimate task of poetic fiction.
A character can never be exhaustive of our materials: for it exists
by its idiosyncrasy, by its contrast with other natures, by its
development of one side, and one side only, of our native capacities.
It is, therefore, not by characterization as such that the ultimate
message can be rendered. The poet can put only a part of himself into
any of his heroes, but he must put the whole into his noblest work.
A character is accordingly only a fragmentary unity; fragmentary in
respect to its origin,--since it is conceived by enlargement, so to
speak, of a part of our own being to the exclusion of the rest,--and
fragmentary in respect to the object it presents, since a character
must live in an environment and be appreciated by contrast and by the
sense of derivation. Not the character, but its effects and causes,
is the truly interesting thing. Thus in master poets, like Homer and
Dante, the characters, although well drawn, are subordinate to the
total movement and meaning of the scene There is indeed something
pitiful, something comic, in any comprehended soul; souls, like other
things, are only definable by their limitations. We feel instinctively
that it would be insulting to speak of any man to his face as we should
speak of him in his absence, even if what we say is in the way of
praise: for absent he is a character understood, but present he is a
force respected.
In the construction of ideal characters, then, the imagination is busy
with material,--particular actions and thoughts,--which suggest their
unification in persons; but the characters thus conceived can hardly
be adequate to the profusion of our observations, nor exhaustive, when
all personalities are taken together, of the interest of our lives.
Characters are initially imbedded in life, as the gods themselves are
originally imbedded in Nature. Poetry must, therefore, to render all
reality, render also the background of its figures, and the events
that condition their acts. We must place them in that indispensable
environment which the landscape furnishes to the eye and the social
medium to the emotions.
The visible landscape is not a proper object for poetry. Its
elements, and especially the emotional stimulation which it gives,
may be suggested or expressed in verse; but landscape is not thereby
represented in its proper form; it appears only as an element and
associate of moral unities. Painting, architecture, and gardening, with
the art of stage setting, have the visible landscape for their object,
and to those arts we may leave it. But there is a sort of landscape
larger than the visible, which escapes the synthesis of the eye; it
is present to that topographical sense by which we always live in the
consciousness that there is a sea, that there are mountains, that the
sky is above us, even when we do not see it, and that the tribes of
men, with their different degrees of blamelessness, are scattered over
the broad-backed earth. This cosmic landscape poetry alone can render,
and it is no small part of the art to awaken the sense of it at the
right moment, so that the object that occupies the centre of vision
may be seen in its true lights, coloured by its wider associations,
and dignified by its felt affinities to things permanent and great.
As the Italian masters were wont not to paint their groups of saints
about the Virgin without enlarging the canvas, so as to render a broad
piece of sky, some mountains and rivers, and nearer, perhaps, some
decorative pile; so the poet of larger mind envelops his characters in
the atmosphere of Nature and history, and keeps us constantly aware of
the world in which they move.
The distinction of a poet--the dignity and humanity of his thought--can
be measured by nothing, perhaps, so well as by the diameter of the
world in which he lives; if he is supreme, his vision, like Dante's,
always stretches to the stars. And Virgil, a supreme poet sometimes
unjustly belittled, shows us the same thing in another form; his
landscape is the Roman universe, his theme the sacred springs of
Roman greatness in piety, consistancy, and law. He has not written a
line in forgetfulness that he was a Roman; he loves country life and
its labours because he sees in it the origin and bulwark of civic
greatness; he honours tradition because it gives perspective and
momentum to the history that ensues; he invokes the gods, because they
are symbols of the physical and moral forces, by which Rome struggled
to dominion.
Almost every classic poet has the topographical sense; he swarms
with proper names and allusions to history and fable; if an epithet
is to be thrown in anywhere to fill up the measure of a line, he
chooses instinctively an appellation of place or family; his wine
is not red, but Samian; his gorges are not deep, but are the gorges
of Hæmus; his songs are not sweet, but Pierian. We may deride their
practice as conventional, but they could far more justly deride ours
as insignificant. Conventions do not arise without some reason, and
genius will know how to rise above them by a fresh appreciation of
their rightness, and will feel no temptation to overturn them in favour
of personal whimsies. The ancients found poetry not so much in sensible
accidents as in essential forms and noble associations; and this fact
marks very clearly their superior education. They dominated the world
as we no longer dominate it, and lived, as we are too distracted to
live, in the presence of the rational and the important.
A physical and historical background, however, is of little moment
to the poet in comparison with that other environment of his
characters,--the dramatic situations in which they are involved. The
substance of poetry is, after all, emotion; and if the intellectual
emotion of comprehension and the mimetic one of impersonation are
massive, they are not so intense as the appetites and other transitive
emotions of life; the passions are the chief basis of all interests,
even the most ideal, and the passions are seldom brought into play
except by the contact of man with man. The various forms of love and
hate are only possible in society, and to imagine occasions in which
these feelings may manifest all their inward vitality is the poet's
function,--one in which he follows the fancy of every child, who puffs
himself out in his day-dreams into an endless variety of heroes and
lovers. The thrilling adventures which he craves demand an appropriate
theatre; the glorious emotions with which he bubbles over must at all
hazards find or feign their correlative objects.
But the passions are naturally blind, and the poverty of the
imagination, when left alone, is absolute. The passions may ferment as
they will, they never can breed an idea out of their own energy. This
idea must be furnished by the senses, by outward experience, else the
hunger of the soul will gnaw its own emptiness for ever. Where the
seed of sensation has once fallen, however, the growth, variations,
and exuberance of fancy may be unlimited. Only we still observe (as in
the child, in dreams, and in the poetry of ignorant or mystical poets)
that the intensity of inwardly generated visions does not involve
any real increase in their scope or dignity. The inexperienced mind
remains a thin mind, no matter how much its vapours may be heated and
blown about by natural passion. It was a capital error in Fichte and
Schopenhauer to assign essential fertility to the will in the creation
of ideas. They mistook, as human nature will do, even when at times
it professes pessimism, an ideal for a reality: and because they saw
how much the will clings to its objects, how it selects and magnifies
them, they imagined that it could breed them out of itself. A man who
thinks clearly will see that such self-determination of a will is
inconceivable, since what has no external relation and no diversity
of structure cannot of itself acquire diversity of functions. Such
inconceivability, of course, need not seem a great objection to a man
of impassioned inspiration; he may even claim a certain consistency in
positing, on the strength of his preference, the inconceivable to be a
truth.
The alleged fertility of the will is, however, disproved by
experience, from which metaphysics must in the end draw its analogies
and plausibility. The passions discover, they do not create, their
occasions; a fact which is patent when we observe how they seize
upon what objects they find, and how reversible, contingent, and
transferable the emotions are in respect to their objects. A doll
will be loved instead of a child, a child instead of a lover, God
instead of everything. The differentiation of the passions, as far as
consciousness is concerned, depends on the variety of the objects of
experience,--that is, on the differentiation of the senses and of the
environment which stimulates them.