place. It is sufficient for our purposes to consider genius as
extraordinary talent, and to know that it is by no means the inevitable
companion of the will to write. The great majority of writers, those
who are without skill and those who produce some interesting and even
important work, are without genius. Yet they have the will to write. And
there have been instances of men and women of undoubted genius so lazy
that they seemed absolutely to lack the creative urge present in the
minds of their less gifted brothers and sisters.
There would be writers if there were no such thing as genius just as
there would be writers if it were impossible to make money by writing.
Consider the earliest days when first by means of crude symbols chiseled
on a rock or by means of rough combinations of sounds a man endeavored
to convey to his fellows some message not necessitated by the ordinary
conditions of life--some message important for its own sake alone. What
caused this man to carve, to chant, to express ideas so that they would
be intelligible to his fellows? If we understand the motives for this
man's conduct, if we find out what made him a creative artist, we shall
understand why modern man writes. For the motives, emotions, essential
habits of mankind do not greatly change with the passing of the ages;
the soul of man has the changelessness of immortal things.
Motives are hard to trace and they are usually found in combination. We
cannot be sure that the first writer had only one motive, but we can
imagine many motives, any one of which would have been sufficient to
cause his literary adventure. These may be indicated as the urge to
chronicle, the urge to attract, the urge to worship, and the urge to
create. And all these are related to and possibly included by the need
of self-expression.
Among the simplest and least literary people, events that greatly
disturb the routine of life--wars, famines, pestilences,
earthquakes--seem to develop writers automatically. The great thing has
happened and must have a record safer than man's fickle memory. So
inevitably come the chronicler and his chronicle. The demand creates the
supply. But the desire to ensure remembrance of events is not in itself
sufficient to ensure the existence of literature. There is also what I
have termed the urge to attract. The savage warrior may carve on stone
or paint upon a strip of pale bark a record of his own brave victory or
ingenious escape. This he does to attract the attention and admiration
of his public, such as it is, to his courage and intelligence. And also
the mere making of the record is in itself an achievement certain to
bring to its maker the wonder and esteem of those lacking this strange
power. And this sort of admiration, he finds, comes to him even when the
things about which he writes are not his own doings. So subjective art
comes into existence. Man writes because of the urge to worship to-day,
as he has always done. He utters prayers that have been provided for his
needs by divinely constituted authorities, and to the unspoken
ejaculation of his heart he silently gives the best literary form
possible to him--the directness and passionate simplicity proper to
great literature. He repeats, when he prays in accordance with the forms
prescribed by the Church, great literature which came into existence
originally in response to the urge to worship. And in all languages the
writings of most enduring loveliness, even apart from those divinely
inspired, are those which relate most closely to worship--those writings
made immortal by the love of God. So writers may fulfill the purpose for
which they are made by writing--may know God better by writing about
Him, increase their love of Him by expressing it in beautiful words,
serve Him in this world by means of their best talent, and because of
this service and His mercy be happy with Him forever in Heaven.
There is also the motive which perhaps gives rise to the common and
fallacious idea of the writer's inspiration--the motive which I have
designated as the urge to create. Of course the only true creator is
God, and for a creature to seem to create may be a perilous thing,
savoring of blasphemy. Certainly the evil egotism of some writers, using
their talent for the destruction of their souls and those of others, is
a blasphemous thing. This is a matter better suited for discussion by a
moral theologian than by a critic, but surely it is possible for the
writer to assay his task of creating a work of art the more humbly and
the more joyfully because it is done in reverent imitation of the Maker
or Poet of the universe.
Now, a writer does not analyze or separate his motives. They all are
related to and possibly included by the need of self-expression. There
is an idea in the writer's brain which he wishes to put into words and
on paper. He does so, without bothering to try to discover why he has
this impulse.
The existence of these motives, in various combinations, is evident in
all literature. The novelist wishes to create a thing of beauty, to
chronicle certain actual or possible events, to attract admiration to
himself and perhaps to a certain class or race of men. If he is a great
writer he has also, even if he be not thoroughly conscious of it, the
desire to worship--he uses his talent honestly and skillfully, for God's
sake, making an acceptable offering. He may write a drama of modern
life, a story of pioneer days in the Far West, a sonnet to a buttercup,
a pamphlet in favor of improved tenement houses, a history of the
Spanish-American War. Whatever he may write, his desire is to chronicle,
attract, and to create. And if he be a great writer his desire also is
to worship.
The power and desire to influence thought possessed by skillful writers
has caused the world sometimes to regard them as actually the leaders of
mankind's spiritual and intellectual endeavors. Writers themselves are
quick to take this point of view; we have in America hundreds of popular
novelists who have no hesitation in advising humanity about all its
moral problems, thousands of minor poets who will answer the questions
of the ages in a sonnet or a handful of free verse. There are some
reasons for the writers to be justly considered leaders of popular
thought. As a class, they understand humanity, and sympathize with it.
They have the passions and hopes and loves of the rest of the world,
intensified. Also they have a sense of artistic, or, as it is called,
poetic justice, and poetic justice usually is Christian justice.
But writers are unfitted to be leaders of popular thought by many
disqualifications inseparable from their craft. Interested as they are
in the rest of humanity, they inevitably are set apart from it by reason
of their exceptional gift. They show their sense of this separation,
even when they do not openly admit it, by dressing and talking and
living in a manner different from that common to their fellow-citizens.
The velvet jacket, the long hair, the flowing necktie, the Bohemian
studio, the defiance of custom and sometimes of law--these things are
indications of that separation from mankind which makes the writer an
unsafe leader of popular thought. There is also the danger that the
writer will, if he become a leader of thought, grow intoxicated with
power, and lead thought irresponsibly, foolishly, wickedly, having in
mind not the welfare of humanity but the delight of leadership. To this
temptation all leaders of thought--politicians, educators,
investigators--are liable, but the writers most of all.
The proper function of the writer is rather to interpret than to lead
the thought of his time. Seldom does a writer actually give the world a
new idea. What he does is to give expression to an idea which has lain
dormant in the mind of the people awaiting his revealing and quickening
touch. There is a hope or a fear in the minds of men--it finds
expression in deeds and simultaneously in words. The events in a
nation's history and the intellectual and spiritual causes of those
events are revealed to later generations by the poets and story-tellers.
The historical development of nations is clear to the students of the
world's literature. Take the American Civil War for an example--we find
the soul of the North revealed in "Marching Through Georgia" and the
"Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the soul of the South in "Dixie" and
in "Maryland, My Maryland." No volumes of history give us a clearer
understanding of the feelings of our fathers than do these poems. So
also I believe that the awakening to a sense of the evil of the
so-called Reformation, that awakening which is historically recorded by
the events associated with the Oxford Movement, found literary
expression in the poetry of Rossetti and Patmore and the other members
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Since the development which history records is merely the outward and
visible sign of an inward and spiritual progress, therefore the proper
themes of creative literary artists are those things which the professed
historians cannot treat--the hidden things, the essentials of history.
So the writers whose work endures are those who concern themselves with
the interior, not the exterior, of life. The great writers are the
spiritual historians of their generation. Physical man is important only
in relation to spiritual man. Man by himself, man not considered in
respect to God, is unworthy of the attention of any writer. The men and
women whose plays and poems and stories endure are those who see that
one cannot "know himself" if he "presume not God to scan." They know
that the proper study of mankind, and the theme of all literature worthy
of the name, is the soul of man.
Literature is a matter of spiritual chronicle and interpretation.
Therefore its beauty must, as Keats said, be truth. The writer
approaches beauty in proportion as the subject of his interpretation
approaches truth. It is a fact that a writer may express an idea which
seems contrary to the feeling of his time--may praise economic justice,
for instance, in the day of great industrial tyranny, or in general
express idealism among materialists. But this should not make us
consider him an untruthful interpreter. Ideas implicit in the people
may be explicit in the writer. And again the writer may express the
thought of a minority more significant than the majority.
The popularity of a writer may be geographical or temporal--perhaps
numerical would give a clearer idea of my meaning than geographical.
That is, he may be read in his own time by many people, spread over a
great part of the world's surface, or he may have the attention of a
public which is great because it extends through the ages. The second
sort of popularity is that which the great writers receive, and
sometimes they have the first kind also. The great writer, the universal
writer, is universal in his theme. And there is only one theme that is
universal--God.
TWO LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY
THE BALLAD
I begin the consideration of the forms of versification with the ballad,
for two reasons. In the first place, this is historically the correct
procedure. The earliest English poetry that has come down to us is in
this form; it is the ballad that, recited in the great hall of the
castle on a Winter evening by some wandering bard, delighted the simple
hearts of our remote forefathers, strong, rude men, few of whom ever
tasted the dainties that are bred in a book. The ballad gave pleasure
not only to the lord and his lady, as they reclined in their great oaken
chairs, but also the chaplain and the men-at-arms and the serving folk
clustered together toward the foot of the table. For the ballad is
universal in its appeal, it is the most democratic kind of poetry.
Perhaps it is not the most primitive sort; the songs of worship or
praise or love which grew out of the earliest dance rituals may have
been more closely akin to the lyric. But these songs must soon have
developed into a recital of the deeds of the god or hero celebrated;
they must have taken on that narrative style which is the essential of
the ballad. We may choose to call Chaucer's "Canterbury Pilgrims" an
epic, if we will, but even so we cannot avoid the feeling that it is a
sequence of ballads. And after all an epic is nothing but a ballad de
luxe.
The second reason for considering the ballad first among the forms of
English verse is the ease with which it may be written. It is the
simplest form of poetical composition, and the novice in the craft of
versification will not find it difficult to attain in it, after a few
attempts, a fair measure of success.
What is the ballad? Let me begin by saying what it is not. It is not a
brief song, although of late years the word has been generally used to
designate almost any rimed composition set to music. People who speak of
some of the popular songs of the day as "sentimental ballads" are using
the term incorrectly. They mean, as a rule, "sentimental lyrics." In
bygone years the ballad was sung, or at any rate recited, to the
accompaniment of a harp or other stringed instrument. But in modern
times the lyric is almost the only sort of poetry to receive a musical
setting.
Furthermore, the ballad is not the ballade. The ballade is a highly
artificial form of verse, French in origin, consisting, as a rule, of
three eight-line stanzas and a four-line envoi, with only three rhymes
in all twenty-eight lines. People with a taste for untra-modern spelling
sometimes label these productions "ballads" instead of "ballades," and
other people sometimes try to give their ballads an archaic flavor by
labeling them "ballades." Both practices are utterly unjustifiable. A
ballade is no more a ballad than a sonnet is a quatrain.
What, then, is a ballad? In "On the History of the Ballads, 1100-1500"
(Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume IV), Professor W. P. Ker
writes: "The truth is that the ballad is an ideal, a poetical form,
which can take up any matter, and does not leave that matter as it was
before." But this, of course, is no definition. It would apply equally
well to all forms of poetry. Professor Ker continues: "In spite of
Socrates and his logic we may venture to say, in answer to the question
'What is a ballad?'--'A Ballad is "The Milldams of Binnorie" and "Sir
Patrick Spens" and "The Douglas Tragedy" and "Lord Randal" and "Childe
Maurice," and things of that sort.'"
That greatest of anthologists, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, quotes these
remarks of Professor Ker in the preface to his volume "The Oxford Book
of Ballads," a book which every lover of poetry and especially every
member of the craft of verse-making should possess. He goes on to
supplement Professor Ker's definition, or rather description, by quoting
lines from a number of famous ballads of ancient days, and saying that
the ballad is these things also and in proof of the statement that
ballads are diverse in manner and theme he mentions as latter-day
ballad-makers poets having so little in common as Sir Walter Scott,
Coleridge and Rudyard Kipling. Thus do Professor Ker and Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch evade the task of definition-making. But they are critics
of poetry and therefore entitled to the use of escapes and evasions
denied to the author of a text-book. Let me therefore say with no
thought of originality in the saying, that a ballad is a story told in
verse. Usually it is told in a sequence of quatrains, with one rhyme to
a stanza, and usually the line is the iambic heptameter--or rather the
stanza consists of two iambic tetrameters and two iambic trimeters. But
this form is not inevitable; the only thing inevitable about a ballad is
that it shall be a story.
Of the ancient ballads there are many collections, of which the most
famous are those of Bishop Percy and of Professor Child. But Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch's book, already mentioned, is sufficiently comprehensive
for the needs of the ordinary student of the subject.
In the preface to this book, Sir Arthur says a rather surprising thing.
He says: "While the lyric in general, still making for variety, is
to-day more prolific than ever and (all cant apart) promises fruit to
equal the best, that particular offshoot which we call the ballad has
been dead, or as good as dead, for two hundred years."
It is hard to understand why Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch made this
statement. In his "The Oxford Book of English Verse" and "The
Oxford Book of Victorian Verse" he had included so many true
ballads--Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel," and Dobell's "Keith of
Ravelston"--which is as authentic a ballad as "Thomas the Rhymer" or
"Sir Patrick Spens." Also Kipling was making genuine ballads of land and
water, and Henry Newbolt was writing his glorious ballads of the British
Navy. The ballad was far from dead; it was no longer the only popular
form of poetry, but it had not ceased to thrive. And the Great War seems
to have given English and American poets new enthusiasm for this form
so suited to the chronicling of deeds of valor.
I have said that the true ballad was a story told in verse. Let me add
that, according to the strictest interpretation of the term, the story
must be told throughout in the third person--the narrator must be merely
a narrator, he cannot figure in the tale. This is true of most of the
old ballads. There are exceptions to the rule, however, notably "Archie
of Cawfield" and the immortal "Helen of Kirconnel." Nor is it necessary
that the modern ballad-maker should take pains to eliminate his own
personality from his work, the modern tendency seems to be toward
subjectivity in poetry and the verse-maker who seeks popular approval
will be guided by popular tastes.
It is true that the very greatest of the ballads are those which were
written in the days when the ballad had not to compete with other forms.
But in accordance with the principle underlying this work--that of
exhibiting the work of successful modern poetic craftsmen, I will not
quote "Sir Patrick Spens" or "Hugh of Lincoln" or "Cospatrick" or
"Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" or any other classic. Instead, I will
call the reader's attention to the work of some of the poets who, in
our own time, have been proving the falsity of Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch's statement.
THE SONNET
I said that the ballad was the most primitive form of English verse
composition of which examples have come down to us, and that it was the
easiest form to write. I now come to what might almost be called the
antithesis of the ballad--the sonnet. The ballad is simple, the sonnet
is complex; the ballad appeals to the uneducated, being, as I said,
merely a short story in verse, while the sonnet appeals chiefly to those
who have a cultivated taste for poetry. It is easy, I said, to write a
passable ballad; to write a sonnet that is merely correct in technique
is a difficult matter, and to write a good sonnet calls for the exercise
of all a verse-maker's patience, ingenuity and talent.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, himself an accomplished sonneteer, finds the
sonnet as "in the literature of modern Europe, a brief poetic form of
fourteen rhymed verses, ranged according to prescription." This
definition is open to criticism in two respects. In the first place it
is redundant, since a poem of fourteen lines necessarily is brief. In
the second place Watts-Dunton neglected to state that the length of the
line is arbitrarily fixed--if the lines are not iambic pentameters, the
poem is not a sonnet.
The first requirements of the sonnet, then, are that it shall have
fourteen lines, and that these lines shall be iambic pentameters.
Furthermore, the rhyme scheme is arbitrarily fixed, and the number of
rhymes arbitrarily limited in such a way as to add greatly to the
verse-maker's labor.
The simplest form of the sonnet is what is called the Shakespearean
sonnet, from its use in the famous sequence in which the greatest of
English poets is said to have "unlocked his heart"--although this does
not seem a fair description of it, when we consider the great library of
books in which attempts are made to explain what Shakespeare meant in
these sonnets. This form consists merely of the quatrains, rhyming _a,
b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f_, followed by a rhymed couplet. The
lines are, as in all forms of the sonnet, iambic pentameters.
Obviously, this form presents no real difficulty to the verse-maker with
a fair degree of talent. Its use by Shakespeare gives it a certain
authority, and some critics, notably Professor Israel Gollanez, of
London University, say that it is better suited the English language
than the more usual or Petrarchan form. Nevertheless, the weight of
opinion is against this form. Many critics deny that three quatrains
followed by a couplet constitute a true sonnet, and Professor Brander
Matthews always calls this form not a sonnet but a "fourteener." Modern
English poets who have written Shakespearean sonnets are few in number.
George Eliot wrote a sequence in this form, but did not thereby add to
her fame. In fact, the only notable use of the Shakespearean sonnet form
during the last half century is to be found in John Masefield's "Good
Friday and Other Poems," which contain a sequence of introspective and
philosophical Shakespearean sonnets, so lofty in thought and appropriate
in expression as actually to suggest the work of the poet who first
greatly made use of their instrument.
The form generally used by poets writing in English is what is called
the Petrarchan sonnet. In its simplest but not its easiest form, this
consists of a division of eight lines called the octave and a division
of six lines called the sestet, the rhyme scheme of the octave being _a,
b, b, a, a, b, b, a_, and that of the sestet being _c, d, c, d, c, d_.
Here we have, you see, only four rhymes in all the fourteen lines. An
excellent example of the Petrarchan sonnet of this exact type is Austin
Dobson's "Don Quixote."
DON QUIXOTE
BY AUSTIN DOBSON
Behind thy pasteboard, on thy battered back,
Thy lean cheek striped with plaster to and fro,
Thy long spear levelled at the unseen foe,
And doubtful Sancho trudging at thy back,
Thou wert a figure strange enough, good lack!
To make wiseacredom, both high and low,
Rub purblind eyes, and (having watched thee go)
Dispatch its Dogberrys upon thy track:
Alas! poor Knight! Alas! poor soul possest!
Yet would to-day, when Courtesy grows chill,
And life's fine loyalties are turned to jest,
Some fire of thine might burn within us still!
Ah, would but one might lay his lance in rest
And charge in earnest--were it but a mill!
This is a good sonnet to study for several reasons. In the first place
the accuracy of the form makes it an excellent model. And in the second
place it illustrates what I have to say as to the correspondence in the
thought of the sonnet and its form.
Now, there have been attempts to make a sonnet the vehicle of a
narrative; these attempts have seldom been successful. A sonnet is
descriptive and interpretative in theme, and it must give at the very
least two aspects of interpretations of the emotion, idea, or object
with which it deals. One of these must be in the octave and the other in
the sestet. Sometimes the idea is merely expressed or described in the
octave, and explained in the sestet, sometimes the idea in the octave
suggests a different idea in the sestet--the point to remember is that
there must be a change in the thought marked by the beginning of the
sonnet's ninth line.
This we see admirably illustrated in Austin Dobson's "Don Quixote." In
the first four lines we have a graphic picture of the mad knight of La
Mancha, and a statement of the effect this vision has upon those who are
wise in this world. But the very first words of the sestet show the
development in the thought. The poet ceases to describe, instead he
expresses emotion, he expresses his pity, his sympathy, his admiration
for Don Quixote, and his wish that the knight might find a successor in
our own day. The octave has its climax and the sestet has its climax,
and the two sections of the poem are related by the continuity of
thought, and divided by the contrast of ideas.