After the critic has enumerated all the stock qualities of the poet,
as taste, fancy, melody, it remains to be said that unless there is
something in him that is _living identity,_ something analogous to the
growing, pushing, reproducing forces of nature, all the rest in the end
pass for but little.
This is perhaps what the German critic, Lessing, really means by
_action,_ for true poems are more like deeds, expressive of something
behind, more like acts of heroism or devotion, or like personal
character, than like thoughts or intellections.
All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical,
assimilative property, a sort of gastric juice which dissolves thought
and form, and holds in vital fusion religions, times, races, and the
theory of their own construction, naming up with electric and defiant
power,--power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living
organism.
There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal.
One means the organic, the other the inorganic; one means growth,
development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The
hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective,
and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there
is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other
distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But
crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the
reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to
find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially
intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or
do not appear at all as solids,--as lime and iron,--any more than they
do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main
thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man
is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion,--fluid
humanity. Out of this arise his forms, as Venus arose out of the sea,
and as man is daily built up out of the liquids of the body. We cannot
taste, much less assimilate, a solid until it becomes a liquid; and your
great idea, your sermon or moral, lies upon your poem a dead, cumbrous
mass unless there is adequate heat and solvent, emotional power. Herein
I think Wordsworth's "Excursion" fails as a poem. It has too much
solid matter. It is an over-freighted bark that does not ride the waves
buoyantly and lifelike; far less so than Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which
is just as truly a philosophical poem as the "Excursion." (Wordsworth is
the fresher poet; his poems seem really to have been written in the open
air, and to have been brought directly under the oxygenating influence
of outdoor nature; while in Tennyson this influence seems tempered or
farther removed.)
The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects
do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft,
which have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature
is perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no
pause, no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly,
without ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without
committing herself to any end, is the law of Nature.
These considerations bring us very near the essential difference
between prose and poetry, or rather between the poetic and the didactic
treatment of a subject. The essence of creative art is always the same;
namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic
or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate
and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to
mount, to escape. We can conceive of life only as something constantly
_becoming._ It plays forever on the verge. It is never _in loco,_ but
always _in transitu._ Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind;
close your hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.
The antithesis of art in method is science, as Coleridge has intimated.
As the latter aims at the particular, so the former aims at the
universal. One would have truth of detail, the other truth of
_ensemble._ The method of science may be symbolized by the straight
line, that of art by the curve. The results of science, relatively to
its aim, must be parts and pieces; while art must give the whole
in every act; not quantitively of course, but qualitively,--by the
integrity of the spirit in which it works.
The Greek mind will always be the type of the artist mind, mainly
because of its practical bent, its healthful objectivity. The Greek
never looked inward, but outward. Criticism and speculation were foreign
to him. His head shows a very marked predominance of the motive and
perceptive powers over the reflective. The expression of the face is
never what we call intellectual or thoughtful, but commanding. His gods
are not philosophers, but delight in deeds, justice, rulership.
Among the differences between the modern and the classical aesthetic
mind is the greater precision and definiteness of the latter. The
modern genius is Gothic, and demands in art a certain vagueness and
spirituality like that of music, refusing to be grasped and formulated.
Hence for us (and this is undoubtedly an improvement) there must always
be something about a poem, or any work of art, besides the evident
intellect or plot of it, or what is on its surface, or what it tells.
This something is the Invisible, the Undefined, almost Unexpressed,
and is perhaps the best part of any work of art, as it is of a noble
personality. To amuse, to exhibit culture, to formulate the aesthetic,
or even to excite the emotions, is by no means all,--is not even the
deepest part. Beside these, and inclosing all, is the general impalpable
effect, like good air, or the subtle presence of good spirits, wordless
but more potent far than words. As, in the superbest person, it is not
merely what he says or knows or shows, or even how he behaves, but the
silent qualities, like gravitation, that insensibly but resistlessly
hold us; so in a good poem, or in any other expression of art.