Poets and problems

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I. THE POET AS A TEACHER 17

II. TEXXYSON" 55

I. The Poet As A Teacher

Gkeatest of the forms of art, poetry retains its influence over the mind and heart of man through all changes of philosophy and religion. He is ever ready to confess its magic charm and to own its subtle power. Whether savage, sage, or saint, it commands his aspirations and bears sway over his feelings. Its rhyme and rhythm, its music and flow of words, draw him to its beauties as an art; but its sentiment and ideal thought lay hold of him with the keenest joy and the deepest satisfaction.

In every man is something of " the vision and the faculty divine." All men see beneath the surface of things, are transformed by feeling, have the sense of beauty, and are awakened to a higher life by visions of what has not yet been made actual in conduct. Few have the gift of expression, or the touch and renewing power of the artist ; but all have their moments of ideal desire and poetic impulse. To a few are given the faculty of poetic utterance, and the power of making words beautiful with passion and imagination. These say what others only feel; and they become the interpreters of the world's inward impulses and ideals.

The poet is loved of mankind because he reveals the thoughts of many hearts, because he says in words of living force and beauty what all experience. He is the world's sayer and singer, finding forms of adequate utterance for the passion that burns within the heart of man, and singing the heart's emotions in words of melody and power. While feeling is awakened in man by the experiences of life and death, the passionate ardors of love and the dark destinies of hate, poetry will continue to attract men and to answer to a need of their natures. While men love they will delight in the poet's art. As the world advances it may bring us a Homer never again, with his naive and primitive look at the fortunes and destinies of men; but feeling itself has known no decay or corruption since Homer sang, and it burns within men with the same mighty passion as in the time of Helen. It has grown purer, sweeter, and nobler with the lapse of ages, less sanguine and volcanic, more humane and gentle ; but not less ardent and imperative. While love remains, while death awaits, while pain and sorrow beset, while aspiration soars, feeling will be to the poet an inspiration and a perennial cause of song. It will fill and satisfy his heart ; it will cause imagination to bring forth ever fresh creations from the boundless treasure of its spirit; it will smite him with a passion for moral insight and greatness, and it will unite him in the bonds of deathless love to the men his brothers for whom he sings.

The poet does not speak what he will, but what he must ; he is the voice of immeasurable powers which lie behind him calling for utterance. He becomes the medium of their expression, the spokesman who comes forth to deliver their thought. There is more in what he says than he knows ; deep things he has not divined, rules of life he has not comprehended, echoes of an immeasurable life he has not realized in its fulness. If he understands all which he sayg, in all its meanings and relations, as reason may take note of them, then he is no poet. There is more in man than reason defines, more in his experience than the understanding can describe; and therefore it is the poet finds a place for his song and a demand for his singing. The larger any truth which comes near to man's life, the less clearly can it be defined, the less is it possible for any words to tell us what it really means and is. A.ffections, and the soul's vision, bear meaning to us in relation to our own experience and capacity. The same words give much to one, little to another. It is not so in geometry ; it is not so in physiology. In these regions of scientific fact there is but one voice to be uttered, and every person gets from the facts the same meaning. The smaller the value, the greater the accuracy. The dead rock can be perfectly described ; but the mother's love is not to be brought within the limits of the finest poem or the most exquisite picture. There is always that which is beyond the limits of description, beyond the methods of reason. Into this region of the largest of all thoughts, the noblest of all experiences, the region of life and its soul-realities, comes the poet. What he has lived he pours forth in his song, telling men what he has seen and what he is. Nothing beyond that can he ever sing with power to toucli other men. If lie has loved, then love will be in his song. If he has seen God as one of the pure in heart may see him, then earth and heaven cannot keep that out of his poem. The moment he stands before us in his singing, with the true light of song kindling his face, that moment we shall know what manner of man he is ; that hour is his heart confessed. So it is the poet helps u^j^^"'^^ to know what we cannot define, to touch the experiences of others with a sense of reality. He does not define the love surpassing the love of women, but his words become so transfused with that love as to kindle the like of it in ourselves.

That which is expressed in poetic form is not any the less true, but all the more true, because too large for any logical statement. Astronomy is the only purely exact science, conformable to the mathematical test ; and it deals with matter only in relations of quantity and position. Next to this is Physics, into which more complex forces and relations enter ; but in which exactness is less often to be obtained. Chemistry presents a field of still more subtle and intangible forces ; precision and certainty are so much the farther removed. The higher the science and its materials, the greater its importance, the more complex its relations^ and the more of life there enters into it, by so much the more are the conclusions obtained wanting in precision. The exact sciences deal only with dead matter. The more life and perfection and beauty, the less we know or can know by the means of absolute statement. The man of science can tell us all we wish to know about a dead moon or a piece of granite rock, but about a flower that grows by the wayside he must have the aid of the poet before he can discover all that it is to man.

Common sense can speak the facts of ordinary affairs. Reason can unriddle the problems of the understanding, and tell us the plain prose of life. The great things of existence, those nearest to our hearts and imaginations, the problems of being and pure living, are never measured by science. These are so great we get only some hint about them here and there, some glimpse of their larger and subtler meanings, some flash of light for a moment. We must turn to philosophy, religion, poetry, and art for an answer to all the deepest questions life suggests to us ; and then we shall find no perfect answers, no entirely satisfactory explanations. The greater and more important a thing is, the less can we know about it with the aid of science ; we must let feeling and imagination flow in upon it when we would get the highest results; and this produces poetry.

In some directions poetry offers us the best and surest knowledge we can have. We should have no difficulty in believing this did we not constantly forget the manifold nature of man's powers and ignore some of the noblest faculties of his mind. Man is not merely a being endowed with reason and a conscience ; he has also affections, emotions, and imagination. To know the whole truth, imagination is as essential as reason. Life cannot be judged correctly unless the emotions offer their testimony. Poetry is as real as science. It is the result of applying emotion and imagination to the facts of nature and life. It is the product of feeling in responsive attitude towards beauty, or it is the imaginative glow and thrill which all deep and true things produce in us. Coleridge defines it as " the blossom and fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language." Matthew Arnold truly says that poetry does not consist in " the power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but

26 POETS AKD PEOBLEMS.

the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations to them ; when this sense is awakened in us as to objects without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects, to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by them, but to have their secret, and to be in harmony with them ; and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can." This is the power of poetry, that it satisfies us, that it fills the heart, that it lifts the whole individual being up into a responsive attitude towards nature, man, and God.

Wordsworth clearly saw that, while science gives us truth, poetry gives us what is even more important. It clothes the skeleton of nature with life and beauty. It is the life and essential nature of whatever we see and know. It is the fragrant bloom of the universe, that gives promise of a new life springing up in it. It is the higher spirit of science ; and thus Wordsworth defined it, in words which are full of truth and beauty alike : " The knowledge both of the poet and the man of science is pleasure ; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of existence, our natural and inalienable inheritance ; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor ; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude : the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion."

To know is not enough for man. We may know all about the stars; but that knowledge does not take the place of the awe and wonder and sense of mystery which the nightly heavens give us when we look up to them with the eyes of the poet. We may know all the bones in a baby's body, have all its physiology at our tongue's end ; but that does in no way replace a mother's delight in it or that knowledge of the babe which comes out of her affection. This halo which the higher nature in man casts about all things, with the aid of emotion and imagination, is as real as the stars ; and without it life would be shorn of its glory and nature of its beauty. It is in this inner region of human experience that poetry finds its place and justification. While there is beauty or deep feelings or sublime

28 POETS AND FEOBLEMS.

thoughts or mighty deeds, poetry will continue to charm the mind of man and weave about him the magic influence of its spirit.

The poet shows us things in their living relations and harmony. He shows us life as it is; presents us with the living beauty and gives us a consummated impression and effect. The man of science must destroy before he can know ; he cuts to pieces what he cannot bring to life. Science and its methods

— lay life's house bare to its inmost room With lens and scalpel.

This is necessary, and must not be complained of; the results thus obtained are important even to the poet, and vastly helpful in all the daily affairs of life. Science is not to be scorned for the sake of poetry, or its methods and their value belittled. It is enough to say, in behalf of poetry, that science does not give us all we wish to know, does not present all the effects which can be obtained from life and nature, and does not solve the mystery of existence. In his " Each and All," Emerson announces a truth which justifies the larger look at things which is the poet's. Nature is beautiful as a whole, in its own relations and orderings. The caged bird loses its charm, because the wood, the sky, and all nature are taken away from about it; and it is no longer a part of that wide-reaching impression which makes the variety, delight, and beauty of nature.

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven, Singing at dawn on the alder bough ; I brought him home, in his nest, at even ; He sings the song, but it cheers not now, For I did not bring home the river and sky ; — He sang to my ear — tliey sang to my eye.

The thrill of joy, the glow of poetic emotion, the sense of all-pervading life and mystery, which we have often felt when we looked on a beautiful landscape the poet has well described : —

Beneath my feet The groimd-pine curled its pretty wreath. Running over the club-moss burrs ; I inhaled the violet's breath; Around me stood the oaks and firs ; Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground ; Over me soared the eternal sky, Full of light and of Deity ; Again I saw, again I heard, The rolling river, the morning bird ; — Beauty through my senses stole ; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

In one of the most impressive passages in all his writings, Wordsworth has also described the effect which may be produced upon the poet by nature, in intimate communion with her. He

describes a youth, when, standing on

the naked top Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun Else up, and bathe the world in light! He looked — Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth, And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay Beneath him; — far and wide the clouds were touched, And in their silent faces could be read Unutterable love. Sound needed none. Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank The spectacle ; sensation, soul, and form All melted into him: they swallowed up His animal being; in them did he live. And by them did he live ; they were his life. In such access of mind, in such high hour Of visitation from the living God, Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired. No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request; Rapt into still communion that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, His mind was a thanksgiving to the Power That made him ; it was blessedness and love.

This response of man's nature to the beautiful is one of the most remarkable features of his life and mind. The poetical disposition grows out of this sense of beauty, and from the glow and fervor it gives to the whole being. It comes, too, from a sense of our harmonious relations to a harmonious universe, from a feeling that man and nature respond t:o and rightly interpret each other; and that they harmoniously blend, as do two notes of music. Nor is this effect limited to man's relations to nature; it is produced by all man's experience in which feeling, beauty, and imagination have a part.

Poetry enters into those higher regions of human experience concerning which no definite account can be given ; where all words fail ; about which all we know is to be obtained by hints, symbols, poetic figures, and imagings. Poetry is truer and more helpful than prose, because it penetrates those regions of feeling, beauty, and spiritual reality, where definitions have no place or justification. There would be no poetry if life were limited to what we can understand ; nor would there be any religion. Indeed, the joy, the beauty, and the promise of life would all be gone if there were nothing which reaches bej^ond our powers of definition. The mystery of existence makes the grandeur and worth of man's nature, as it makes for him his poetry and his religion. Poetry suggests, hints, images forth, what is too wonderful, too transcendent, too near primal reality, too full of life, beauty, and joy, for explanation or comprehension. It embodies man's longing after the Eternal One, expresses his sense of the deep mystery of Being, voices his soul-sorrow, illumines his path with hope and objects of beauty. Man's aspiration, his sense of imperfection, his yearning for a sustaining truth and reality as the life within and over all things, find expression in poetry; because it offers the fittest medium of interpretation for these higher movements of soul. Whenever the soul feels deeply, or is stirred by a great thought, the poetic form of utterance at once becomes the most natural and desirable for its loving and faithful interpretation.

Man has within him a need for the food which does not perish ; he always is finding anew that he cannot live by bread alone. His mind will crave truth, his heart love, somewhat to satisfy the inward needs of life. A heavenly homesickness will draw him away from the material to those aesthetic and spiritual realities which are at the source of the truest poetry. Whenever these wants find fit interpretation, the poet and the poetic method of expression appear and give to them outward forms of beauty. Consequently the poet is

One in whom persuasion and belief Have ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition.

He is roused and inspired by the world in which he lives ; it carries him away with its beauty and its reality, and he pours forth the impressions which it makes upon him with a sense of creative delight. The semi-unconsciousness and the ecstasy with which his mind is wrapped, testify to the glow and the ardor and the rapture in which his work is done. Then " he thinks God's thoughts after him," in a fresh access of creative power ; and he, too, becomes the maker of worlds and the creator of new beings.

The man of science regards the universe as a problem to be solved ; the poet discovers it to be the endless forth-putting of a beautiful and bountiful life. For him it is a wonderful epic of life and death to be read ; a great picture to be gazed at with longing and soul-imbibing eyes, or a song whose passion and rapture fill his heart with quenchless joy. He would infuse himself with its spirit, and lift himself to the level of its beauty. It is to him a work of art that satisfies him for the moment, but into which a higher life and a more consummate spirit are ever being poured. The song of a deathless singer, it unfolds new heights and depths, new ardors of passion, fresh pathos and hope, and a widening glory and range of power, as the harmony ]3roceeds and the singer gives himself more and more to the purpose of malving his singing an image of his own being. To touch the harp with some echoes of the Master's unfading music is the aim and joy of the poet. Ever within him is heard, in dreams and waking hours alike, that perfect music of the Abounding Life, that quenchless song of the stars as they spin, of flowers as they bloom, of women as they love, and of men as they aspire; and it incarnates itself in him until he becomes an seolian harp to repeat it for the sustainment of human hearts.

As one note of music accords with and completes another, the poet takes the universe into himself and repeats it with a finer harmony and as a note of richer music. He does not look at it from without; but he is one with it, and thrills with its every rapture. Because he loves it, and opens his heart to its every whisper of confidence, it tells him its inmost secrets, and adopts him as its own.

The poet is the child of nature, as he is the child of humanity. He is the creature of the deepest affection of these wedded ones, and cherished of them both with a love the most tender and sympathetic. He has played about the knees of humanity, and he has romped with nature over hill and dale. The love of the one and the beauty of the other come to him as his own, and are the fruitful inspiration of his song. As they combine and harmonize in his nature, a life more ample, and with a new glory of being, goes forth to meet the morn of a new day. Thus gifted with the largess of spiritual vision, the poet becomes the world's prophet and inspirer. The glory of stars as they first flash into the field of human vision, and of Edens that beckon to men out of the far-off inviting future, reflect themselves in his face, and kindle there a new light to lead men upward. He invites men to new countries of the ideal and to untrodden worlds of spiritual reality. He awakens in them a thirst for the fountains of life and beauty, and he gives them a longing to go forth to that country beyond the borders of material fact, and to partake of its satisfying waters. He makes men pilgrims; he makes them searchers. Under his inspiration the present ceases to satisfy; they behold the more perfect, and will not be content until tliey have possessed it.

True poetry consists not in a form of expression, but in the higher spirit which it contains. There is more true poetry in one of the prose chapters of Ruskin than in many a volume of newly turned verse. Beauty and symmetry of language, involving rhyme and rhythm, increase and intensify beauty of thought and sentiment; but in themselves rhyme and metre cannot make poetry. There must be an inward beauty, an informing spirit of creative power, or the poetry is wanting. It is beauty, feeling and imagination alone which make poetry; and if these are absent it is the baldest prose which results, whatever the form given to the language.

The true antithesis, as Coleridge suggests, is not between poetry and prose, but between poetr}^ and science. Science analyzes ; poetry creates. Science seeks for facts; poetry for life. The poet penetrates to the heart of the world through sympathy. He reads it as a lover ; his heart goes forth to it as to its own. He is one that draws into his soul all that the world and life can reveal, and who presses beyond them towards the goal of being, where all that is hidden is to be made known. He knows the heart of his beloved, because his heart is one with hers. Over and above what the student of human nature can tell him about her he knows her as a being of affection and spiritual apprehension, whose nature has been brought into living and loving sympathy with his own. Life has revealed herself to the poet as one beloved with an affection the deepest and truest.

Poetry is a process of creation, and the poet is a maker. Law reigns in what he makes, but life reigDS even more. It is to be measured by its vitality, by the depth and superbness and wholeness of the life it manifests, and not by its fine ordering of syllable and sound. The greater the poet the more he makes form yield itself subservient to the richness of his imagination and the deep ardors of his passion. The world-poets make the technique of their art a plastic instrument in their hands, yielding not to it as to something which controls them, but working with it, as if it had become a part of their own natures. In our own day we see Browning holding himself aloof from the rigid requirements of the poetic art, sporting with rhyme and metre, and refusing to 3'ield himself to the enchantments of this fair Delilah. He is conscious that poetry has a higher purpose and power than lie embosomed in these things of outward form. He rejects and scorns the beauty which has no other meaning than color and decoration in dress.

Browning's independence of the mere technique of poetry is to be admired, for we have had quite too much of slavish conformity to outward rules. Poetic independence is to be desired, freedom of utterance, the greatness and originality which rise in lofty courage of spirit above the rules which have been laid down by the mere ingenuity of men. The more rules the worse for art ; and the more closely they are followed the less life and genius are the result. The ages when rules are most loved and studied are the ages when stiffness and rigidity predominate, when originality and independence least assert themselves. The creative spirit makes its own rules or comes close to those of nature herself. Not, however, that lawlessness is to be the rule in art ; nothing of the kind, but that the creative faculties make rules which cannot be defined to the intellect. They see instinctively what is best, and are inclined, when free, to do what is most truly in accordance with nature and life.

This independence is characteristic of our century. Tlie age of Burns and Wordsworth would not longer follow the rules which guided the age of Dryden and Pope ; it broke away from them, and came back to simpler forms and means of expression. That spirit has continued down to the present time, and asserts itself in many an ignoring of the methods of the schools. It is to be seen in the lawlessness of such men as Whitman, who throw aside all form ; in the disregard of rules and rhyme by such lovers of feeling as Mrs. Browning ; in the rugged utterance of forcible thought on the part of men like Browning, and even in the perfect music and melody of such men as Tennyson and Swinburne. These last have shown the same tendency as the others, in that they have widened the range of the old forms, no longer being content with the traditional laws of poetry. They will comply with rules only as the rules are the expression of living impulses of poetic desire, and as they assist the mind on the way to harmony and perfection of form.

Poetry cannot be made by rule. The more the rules are thought of the less is the result in poetry. It is true enough that there must be a groundwork of rule, and compliance with the fixed requirements of form ; but the poet who is obliged to keep these in his mind, and to work conscious of them, is sure never to produce anything worthy of the name of true art. The poet who counts his syllables to see if the lines are of the right length, is no poet worthy of the name. He must know as by instinct, even more surely than if he counted, that they are right, or there is no hope for him. The musician gives much time to the study of the technique of his art, and he recognizes that it rests on a basis of rigid mathematical rule ; but with this there must be a soul for music, an ear that tells if it is right, and a heart that catches up in an instant all the pathos and loveliness of it. The passion and the instinct for music absent, the most perfect knowledge of the rules and laws is utterly incapable of producing it. These given, music will result, even if there is no technical knowledge.

So it is in poetry ; the soul must have a touch of heavenly beauty in it, or no poetry can grow out of it. Rules will not put it in or take it out. This the rules will do, how^ever; dry it up, and turn the pure stream of that water of life from a babbling brook full of delight, as it pours down the mountain side, into a mere ditch, very regular, but wanting all charm and beauty. Not that there can be genuine poetry without rules and form, for these are always necessary in their place ; but they are, and must be kept, subordinate; and they are not to be enforced against the poet who chooses to create some other way for himself than that which is in common use.

Life is not manifested in customs and costumes, but in spontaneity and spirit. The more man lives by conventional rule the more he lives on the surface of his nature, and the more he fails to reach the deepest springs of original and noble purpose. If he lives to conform he lives feebly, and he can never be himself in a life-giving manner. So in poetry ; it must come to life and expression, not out of the conventional and traditional, but out of what the poet has seen for himself, and experienced with his own soul. If it has this latter quality, it can in some measure dispense with the merely technical requirements. All true poetry is lived ; is music, harmony, and grandeur in the soul first, and then puts itself into words in that way which will best produce upon others the same effects which have been produced upon the poet or which will kindle in other hearts the living fire of truth and beauty which were first in his heart. If this power is carried swiftly and surely from one to the other, and the poet has the gift of making others see what he has seen, feel what he has felt, and believe what he has believed, the form little matters. It is this power of kindling the fires of truth and beauty in other souls which is the real power and charm of the poet ; and if this is wanting, all else that is of much value is also absent. It is not enough to please, if pleasing is all, though that has its place and its value as truly as other things have theirs; but genuine poetry is the outgrowth of what is otherwise intrinsically good, and for other reasons. Nothing genuinely pleases which does not do more than gratify for the moment. True pleasure grows out of roots of beauty, truth, and right ; and it must always have ends other than its own.