to certain limited forms of life by the organs which it wears; and
its blank potentiality becomes actual in thought and deed, according
to the fortunes and relations of its organism. The ripeness of the
passions may thus precede the information of the mind and lead to
groping in by-paths without issue; a phenomenon which appears not only
in the obscure individual whose abnormalities the world ignores, but
also in the starved, half-educated genius that pours the whole fire of
his soul into trivial arts or grotesque superstitions. The hysterical
forms of music and religion are the refuge of an idealism that has
lost its way; the waste and failures of life flow largely in those
channels. The carnal temptations of youth are incidents of the same
maladaptation, when passions assert themselves before the conventional
order of society can allow them physical satisfaction, and long before
philosophy or religion can hope to transform them into fuel for its own
sacrificial flames.
Hence flows the greatest opportunity of fiction. We have, in a sense,
an infinite will; but we have a limited experience, an experience sadly
inadequate to exercise that will either in its purity or its strength.
To give form to our capacities nothing is required but the appropriate
occasion; this the poet, studying the world, will construct for us out
of the materials of his observations. He will involve us in scenes
which lie beyond the narrow lane of our daily ploddings; he will place
us in the presence of important events, that we may feel our spirit
rise momentarily to the height of his great argument. The possibilities
of love or glory, of intrigue and perplexity, will be opened up before
us; if he gives us a good plot, we can readily furnish the characters,
because each of them will be the realization of some stunted potential
self of our own. It is by the plot, then, that the characters will be
vivified, because it is by the plot that our own character will be
expanded into its latent possibilities.
The description of an alien character can serve this purpose only very
imperfectly; but the presentation of the circumstances in which that
character manifests itself will make description unnecessary, since
our instinct will supply all that is requisite for the impersonation.
Thus it seems that Aristotle was justified in making the plot the chief
element in fiction: for it is by virtue of the plot that the characters
live, or, rather, that we live in them, and by virtue of the plot
accordingly that our soul rises to that imaginative activity by which
we tend at once to escape from the personal life and to realize its
ideal. This idealization is, of course, partial and merely relative to
the particular adventure in which we imagine ourselves engaged. But in
some single direction our will finds self-expression, and understands
itself; runs through the career which it ignorantly coveted, and
gathers the fruits and the lesson of that enterprise.
This is the essence of tragedy: the sense of the finished life, of
the will fulfilled and enlightened: that purging of the mind so much
debated upon, which relieves us of pent-up energies, transfers our
feelings to a greater object, and thus justifies and entertains our
dumb passions, detaching them at the same time for a moment from their
accidental occasions in our earthly life. An episode, however lurid,
is not a tragedy in this nobler sense, because it does not work itself
out to the end; it pleases without satisfying, or shocks without
enlightening. This enlightenment, I need hardly say, is not a matter
of theory or of moral maxims; the enlightenment by which tragedy is
made sublime is a glimpse into the ultimate destinies of our will.
This discovery need not be an ethical gain--Macbeth and Othello attain
it as much as Brutus and Hamlet--it may serve to accentuate despair,
or cruelty, or indifference, or merely to fill the imagination for
a moment without much affecting the permanent tone of the mind. But
without such a glimpse of the goal of a passion the passion has not
been adequately read, and the fiction has served to amuse us without
really enlarging the frontiers of our ideal experience. Memory and
emotion have been played upon, but imagination has not brought anything
new to the light.
The dramatic situation, however, gives us the environment of a single
passion, of life in one of its particular phases; and although a
passion, like Romeo's love, may seem to devour the whole soul, and
its fortunes may seem to be identical with those of the man, yet much
of the man, and the best part of him, goes by the board in such a
simplification. If Leonardo da Vinci, for example, had met in his youth
with Romeo's fate, his end would have been no more ideally tragic than
if he had died at eighteen of a fever; we should be touched rather by
the pathos of what he had missed, than by the sublimity of what he had
experienced. A passion like Romeo's, compared with the ideal scope of
human thought and emotion, is a thin dream, a pathological crisis.
Accordingly Aristophanes, remembering the original religious and
political functions of tragedy, blushes to see upon the boards a
woman in love. And we should readily agree with him, but for two
reasons,--one, that we abstract too much, in our demands upon art, from
nobility of mind, and from the thought of totality and proportion;
the other, that we have learned to look for a symbolic meaning in
detached episodes, and to accept the incidental emotions they cause,
because of their violence and our absorption in them, as in some sense
sacramental and representative of the whole. Thus the picture of an
unmeaning passion, of a crime without an issue, does not appear to
our romantic apprehension as the sorry farce it is, but rather as a
true tragedy. Some have lost even the capacity to conceive of a true
tragedy, because they have no idea of a cosmic order, of general laws
of life, or of an impersonal religion. They measure the profundity of
feeling by its intensity, not by its justifying relations; and in the
radical disintegration of their spirit, the more they are devoured the
more they fancy themselves fed. But the majority of us retain some
sense of a meaning in our joys and sorrows, and even if we cannot
pierce to their ultimate object, we feel that what absorbs us here
and now has a merely borrowed or deputed power; that it is a symbol
and foretaste of all reality speaking to the whole soul. At the same
time our intelligence is too confused to give us any picture of that
reality, and our will too feeble to marshal our disorganized loves into
a religion consistent with itself and harmonious with the comprehended
universe. A rational ideal eludes us, and we are the more inclined to
plunge into mysticism.
Nevertheless, the function of poetry, like that of science, can only be
fulfilled by the conception of harmonies that become clearer as they
grow richer. As the chance note that comes to be supported by a melody
becomes in that melody determinate and necessary, and as the melody,
when woven into a harmony, is explicated in that harmony and fixed
beyond recall; so the single emotion, the fortuitous dream, launched
by the poet into the world of recognizable and immortal forms, looks
in that world for its ideal supports and affinities. It must find them
or else be blown back among the ghosts. The highest ideality is the
comprehension of the real. Poetry is not at its best when it depicts
a further possible experience, but when it initiates us, by feigning
something which as an experience is impossible, into the meaning of the
experience which we have actually had.
The highest example of this kind of poetry is religion; and although
disfigured and misunderstood by the simplicity of men who believe in
it without being capable of that imaginative interpretation of life
in which its truth consists, yet this religion is even then often
beneficent, because it colours life harmoniously with the ideal.
Religion may falsely represent the ideal as a reality, but we must
remember that the ideal, if not so represented, would be despised by
the majority of men, who cannot understand that the value of things
is moral, and who therefore attribute to what is moral a natural
existence, thinking thus to vindicate its importance and value. But
value lies in meaning, not in substance; in the ideal which things
approach, not in the energy which they embody.
The highest poetry, then, is not that of the versifiers, but that of
the prophets, or of such poets as interpret verbally the visions
which the prophets have rendered in action and sentiment rather than
in adequate words. That the intuitions of religion are poetical, and
that in such intuitions poetry has its ultimate function, are truths
of which both religion and poetry become more conscious the more they
advance in refinement and profundity. A crude and superficial theology
may confuse God with the thunder, the mountains, the heavenly bodies,
or the whole universe; but when we pass from these easy identifications
to a religion that has taken root in history and in the hearts of
men, and has come to flower, we find its objects and its dogmas
purely ideal, transparent expressions of moral experience and perfect
counterparts of human needs. The evidence of history or of the senses
is left far behind and never thought of; the evidence of the heart, the
value of the idea, are alone regarded.
Take, for instance, the doctrine of transubstantiation. A metaphor here
is the basis of a dogma, because the dogma rises to the same subtle
region as the metaphor, and gathers its sap from the same soil of
emotion. Religion has here rediscovered its affinity with poetry, and
in insisting on the truth of its mystery it unconsciously vindicates
the ideality of its truth. Under the accidents of bread and wine lies,
says the dogma, the substance of Christ's body, blood, and divinity.
What is that but to treat facts as an appearance, and their ideal
import as a reality? And to do this is the very essence of poetry, for
which everything visible is a sacrament--an outward sign of that inward
grace for which the soul is thirsting.
In this same manner, where poetry rises from its elementary and
detached expressions in rhythm, euphuism, characterization, and
story-telling, and comes to the consciousness of its highest function,
that of portraying the ideals of experience and destiny, then the
poet becomes aware that he is essentially a prophet, and either
devotes himself, like Homer or Dante, to the loving expression of
the religion that exists, or like Lucretius or Wordsworth, to the
heralding of one which he believes to be possible. Such poets are
aware of their highest mission; others, whatever the energy of their
genius, have not conceived their ultimate function as poets. They have
been willing to leave their world ugly as a whole, after stuffing it
with a sufficient profusion of beauties. Their contemporaries, their
fellow-countrymen for many generations, may not perceive this defect,
because they are naturally even less able than the poet himself to
understand the necessity of so large a harmony. If he is short-sighted,
they are blind, and his poetic world may seem to them sublime in its
significance, because it may suggest some partial lifting of their
daily burdens and some partial idealization of their incoherent
thoughts.
Such insensibility to the highest poetry is no more extraordinary than
the corresponding indifference to the highest religion; nobility and
excellence, however, are not dependent on the suffrage of half-baked
men, but on the original disposition of the clay and the potter; I mean
on the conditions of the art and the ideal capacities of human nature.
Just as a note is better than a noise because, its beats being regular,
the ear and brain can react with pleasure on that regularity, so all
the stages of harmony are better than the confusion out of which they
come, because the soul that perceives that harmony welcomes it as the
fulfilment of her natural ends. The Pythagoreans were therefore right
when they made number the essence of the knowable world, and Plato was
right when he said harmony was the first condition of the highest good.
The good man is a poet whose syllables are deeds and make a harmony in
Nature. The poet is a rebuilder of the imagination, to make a harmony
in that. And he is not a complete poet if his whole imagination is not
attuned and his whole experience composed into a single symphony.
For his complete equipment, then, it is necessary, in the first place,
that he sing; that his voice be pure and well pitched, and that his
numbers flow; then, at a higher stage, his images must fit with one
another; he must be euphuistic, colouring his thoughts with many
reflected lights of memory and suggestion, so that their harmony may
be rich and profound; again, at a higher stage, he must be sensuous and
free, that is, he must build up his world with the primary elements of
experience, not with the conventions of common sense or intelligence;
he must draw the whole soul into his harmonies, even if in doing so
he disintegrates the partial systematizations of experience made
by abstract science in the categories of prose. But finally, this
disintegration must not leave the poet weltering in a chaos of sense
and passion; it must be merely the ploughing of the ground before a
new harvest, the kneading of the clay before the modelling of a more
perfect form. The expression of emotion should be rationalized by
derivation from character and by reference to the real objects that
arouse it--to Nature, to history, and to the universe of truth; the
experience imagined should be conceived as a destiny, governed by
principles, and issuing in the discipline and enlightenment of the
will. In this way alone can poetry become an interpretation of life and
not merely an irrelevant excursion into the realm of fancy, multiplying
oar images without purpose, and distracting us from our business
without spiritual gain.
If we may then define poetry, not in the formal sense of giving the
minimum of what may be called by that name, but in the ideal sense
of determining the goal which it approaches and the achievement in
which all its principles would be fulfilled, we may say that poetry is
metrical and euphuistic discourse, expressing thought which is both
sensuous and ideal.
Such is poetry as a literary form; but if we drop the limitation to
verbal expression, and think of poetry as that subtle fire and inward
light which seems at times to shine through the world and to touch the
images in our minds with ineffable beauty, then poetry is a momentary
harmony in the soul amid stagnation or conflict,--a glimpse of the
divine and an incitation to a religious life.
Religion is poetry become the guide of life, poetry substituted
for science or supervening upon it as an approach to the highest
reality. Poetry is religion allowed to drift, left without points of
application in conduct and without an expression in worship and dogma;
it is religion without practical efficacy and without metaphysical
illusion. The ground of this abstractness of poetry, however, is
usually only its narrow scope; a poet who plays with an idea for half
an hour, or constructs a character to which he gives no profound
moral significance, forgets his own thought, or remembers it only as
a fiction of his leisure, because he has not dug his well deep enough
to tap the subterraneous springs of his own life. But when the poet
enlarges his theatre and puts into his rhapsodies the true visions
of his people and of his soul, his poetry is the consecration of his
deepest convictions, and contains the whole truth of his religion. What
the religion of the vulgar adds to the poet's is simply the inertia
of their limited apprehension, which takes literally what he meant
ideally, and degrades into a false extension of this world on its own
level what in his mind was a true interpretation of it upon a moral
plane.
This higher plane is the sphere of significant imagination, of relevant
fiction, of idealism become the interpretation of the reality it
leaves behind. Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical
with religion grasped in its inmost truth; at their point of union
both reach their utmost purity and beneficence, for then poetry loses
its frivolity and ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its
illusions and ceases to deceive.