The Nature and Elements of Poetry

Front matter

THE NATURE AND ELEMENTS OF POETRY

THE MUSE OF CHRISTENDOM

Page 140

Beauty

V.

BEAUTY.

For the moment, and somewhat out of the order of discussion, I will assume that no poem Poetry as an artistic expression of the beautiful.can have birth without that unconscious process of the soul which is recognized in our use of words like "intuition," "insight," "genius," "inspiration." Nor can it be brought to completeness without the exercise of conscious afterthought. True poetry, however, is reinforced by three dynamic elements. No work of art is worth considering unless it is more or less effective through beauty, feeling, and imagination; and in the consideration of art, truth and ethics are a part of beauty's fidelity to supreme ideals.

You will find it needful to examine the nature of that which is termed Beauty, before ackowledging that poetry can be no exception, but What, then, is Beauty?rather the chief illustration, when it is declared that an indispensable function of the arts is the expression of the beautiful.

With respect to the artists and critics who abjure that declaration,—as when, for instance, The denial of its indispensability.a critic said of an American draughtsman that he was too fine an artist to concern himself about mere beauty,—I am convinced that they simply are in rebellion against hackneyed standards. They have adopted some fresh, and therefore welcome, notion as to what is attractive. This they have given a new name, to distinguish it from an established and too familiar standard. They are unwittingly wooing beauty in a new dress,—the same goddess, with more disguises than Venus Mater. Some day they will recognize her, et vera incessu patuit dea, and again be taught that she never permits her suitors to escape. She has the secret of keeping them loyal in spite of themselves. This belief that they are free is a charm by which she lures them to her unknown haunts, rewarding them with the delight of discovery, or ironically permitting them to set up claims for invention. One may even compare beauty to the wise and charming wife who encourages a fickle husband's attentions at a masquerade. She has a thousand graces and coquetries. At last the masks are removed. "What, is it you? And still superior to all others!" He needs must worship her more than ever, and own that none can rival her adorable and "infinite variety."

No; the only consistent revolt is on the part of A logical but purely Berkeleian theory.those who declare that she has no real existence,—that beauty is a chimera. Let me confess at once that I am not in their ranks. I doubt whether any artist, or any thinker who honestly loves art and has an instinct for it, believes this theory of æsthetics, though he may advocate it or be driven into its acceptance. An argument can be made on that side, granting certain premises. Even then it is a dispute about terms. The claim may serve for metaphysicians, not for those whose vocations relate to the expression of artistic ideas in what is called tangible form. Go back to Berkeley and his forebears, if you like. Deny the existence of all things,—for that is what you must do if you deny the actuality of beauty, else you are instantly routed. Your only safe claim is that naught but soul exists, and this not the general soul, but your own soul, your Ego. You think, therefore you are; everything else is, for all that I can prove, the caprice of your own dream. Some of our modern transcendentalists, vaunting their Platonic allegiance to ideal beauty, affected Its supporters.indifference to its material emblems. The modern impressionists, after all the most ardent and ingenuous of technicists, are unwittingly their direct successors. Now, the transcendentalists often were speculators, and not, as they deemed themselves, artists and poets. Having little command over the beautiful, they took refuge in discrediting it. I speak of certain of the followers: their chief was Argus-eyed. In Emerson Emerson's own view.the true poet constantly broke loose. He, too, looked inward for the ideal beauty, that purest discovery of the soul, but in song he always recognized its visible reality:—

For Nature beats in perfect tune, And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake."

But, as I say, the recantation of beauty, by transcendentalists, realists, and impressionists alike, is the search for her in some other of her many Impressionism.realms. Whatsoever kingdom the impressionist enters, he still finds her on the throne. For him she may veil herself in twilight and half-tints,—or at rare instants of perception in still more witching drapery worn for him alone. The individual impressions enrich our museum of her portraitures. The impressionist depicts her not as she was known to Pheidias, or Raphael, or Velasquez, but as she appears to his own favored vision. This is the truth that makes impressionism a brave factor in modern art and poetry. What lessens its vantage is the delusion, absurd as Malvolio's, of incompetents, each of whom fancies that he is in special favor and that myopic vision and eccentric technic result in impressions that are worth recording.

Whenever there is a notable break from that mediocrity falsely termed "correct," which lurks in academic arras, it is not a rebellion but a just revo . This is why it has been said that "the strength of Shakespeare lay in the fact Art's new departures.that he had no taste; he was not a man of letters." But men of letters now accept Shakespeare as their highest master. Thus every new movement or method in art has the added form of strangeness at first,—of a true romanticism. In time this, too, becomes classicism and academic. The mediocrities, the dullards of art, are ever the camp-followers of its shining soldiery. In every campaign, under every mode that a genius brings into vogue, they ultimately pitch their ragged tents; and even if they do not sink the cause into disrepute, they make in time a new departure necessary. In the greatest work, however, there will be found always a fresh originality that is not radically opposed to principles already established; you will have a union of classicism and romanticism.

Any poem or painting which produces a serious and lasting impression will in the end be The æsthetic canon.found to have a beauty, not merely of its own, but allied to universal types and susceptible of logical analysis. Its royal stamp will be detected by the expert. Gainsay this, and you count out a host of the elect brotherhood who make this the specific test,—who will forego other elements (as in religion the Church passes over minor matters if you accept its one essential) and concentrate their force upon the dogma tersely expressed by Poe when he defined poetry as One need not accept this as a sufficient statement, but one may assert that no statement is sufficient which does not pointedly include it.

Confront, however, the fact that the new æsthetic Æsthetics as the study of "the mani­fes­tations of artistic genius."is grounded in science, and see to what this leads. It opposes, for example, the theory of those who accept the existence of a something which we recognize as beauty, and which as a sensible and primary quality can be defined only by itself, or by a synonym, though its conditions are observable and reasons can be given for it. Expression is its source; is not beauty itself, but that which gives Eugène Véron's expo­si­tion of "per­sonal art."objects beauty. Now Véron, a forcible expositor of the school that has in mind the scientific situation, declares that beauty is solely in the eye or mind of the artist, and that everything turns on the expression of his impression. The latter clause is true enough. The beauty which the painter or poet offers us certainly depends upon the quality of his vision, upon his ability to give us something in accord with gen laws, yet deriving a special charm and power from the touch or atmosphere of his personal genius. As each race has its specific mode of vision, so for each there are as many and different impressions and expressions as the race has artists; and the general or academic outlines of perfection being known, the distinctive value of a poem or painting does come from its maker's habit of vision and interpretation.

But why, in order to advance the banner of impressionism,Yet beauty is no less a force existent. or of neo-impressionism, or of realism, good as these may be, should we assume the task of denying beauty altogether? Beauty is confessedly not a substance; you cannot weigh it with scales or measure it with a yard-stick: but it lies in a vibratory expression of substances. It characterizes that substance which enforces upon intelligence—in our case, upon human intelligence—a perception of its fitness. In the mind of a creative poet, it is a quality of his imagined substance,—poetry dealing, as we have seen, with "the shews of things" and treating them as if real. To the pure idealist they are the only realities, as Emerson himself implied in his remark when called away from an abstract discussion in the library to inspect a farmer's load of wood: "Excuse me a moment, my friends. We have to attend to these matters just as if they were real."

To be sure, from the place where I stand, I cannot see the rays, the vibrations, which convey to you the aspect of something in your line of vision:Its vibrations actually occur, the light and shape and color which constitute your impression are your personal sensations. But the vibrations which produce them are actually occurring, and the quality of the substance from which they emanate is operative,—unless, again, you choose to deny in toto the existence of matter,—and, after every allowance has been made for personal variation, if I move to your point of view, they will, so far as we can know anything, produce approximately the same effect upon my mind and upon yours. It matters not throughand excite our spiritual perception of them. which of the senses impressions are received: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, all resolve themselves at last into spiritual feeling. Form, for example, appeals to the touch as well as to the eye. Note the blind Herreshoff, that skilled designer of the swift, graceful hulls of yachts and other cruisers. As his sensitive fingers passed over, and shaped, and reshaped his model, he had as keen a sense of the beauty of its lines as we have in seeing them. A poem, conveyed by touch to one congenitally deaf, dumb, and blind, will impress him only with the beauty of its thought, construction, and metric concordance; but in one who has lost his sight and hearing in mature years, and who retains his memories, it will excite ideas of Form and sentiment.sound and imagery and color. Moral and intellectual beauty is the spiritual analogue of that which is sensuous; but just now we are regarding concrete qualities; for example, the form, the verbal and rhythmical excellence, of a poet's poem. Our reference to arts that specially appeal to the eye is illustrative, since they afford the diagrams, so to speak, of most service in this discussion.

For the perception of the beautiful there must be a soul in conjunction; that statement is Beauty is the quality regulating certain vibrations.irrefutable. Yet I think that the quality of beauty exists in substances, even if there be no intelligence at hand to receive an impression of it; that if a cataract has been falling and thundering and prismatically sparkling in the heart of a green forest, from time immemorial, and with no human being to wonder at it, it has no less the attribute of beauty; it is waiting, as Kepler said of its Creator, "six thousand years for an interpreter." Suppose that an exquisite ode by Sappho or Catullus has been buried for twenty centuries in some urn or crypt: its beauty is there, and may come to light. Grant that our sense of material beauty is the impression caused by vibrations; then the quality regulating those vibrations is what I mean by the "beauty" of the substance whence they emanate. Grant what we term the extension of that substance; the characteristics of that extension are what affect us. There is no escape, you see, unless, with Berkeley, you say there is no matter.

This is just what the poet, the artist, is not called upon to do. He is at the outset a phenomenalist. He sets forth his apparitions of things, idealizing The poet receptive to universal pheuomeua.them for the delight of himself and the world. And as to the law of beauty, whether it lies in use or proportion or what not, it all comes back to the truths of nature, to the perfection of the universe, to that sense of the fitness of things which is common to us all in our respective degrees; so that there are some objects so perfect that we all, if of the same breed and condition, assent to their beauty. There are women, for example, who take the world with beauty at first glance, and there are other objects only partly beautiful, less perfect, about which, therefore, even critical judgments are in dispute. That beauty does go somewhat with use is plain from its creation by necessity. The vessel that is most beautiful, that differs most from the lines of a junk or scow, is the one best fitted safely and swiftly to ride the waves. The condition is the same with everything in nature and art, from a bird to a portico. If the essence of Beauty the natural quality of all things.beauty lies in conformity to the law and fitness of things, then all natural things are as beautiful as they can be,—that is, beauty is their natural quality; they develop it unconsciously as far as possible under limitations imposed by the pervading struggle for existence. That is what leads Hartmann to assert that in Nature's beauty "the individual, who is at the same time marble and sculpture, realizes the Idea perfectly unconsciously; in human artistic production, on the other hand, the instigation of consciousness supervenes."

The poet, through intuition and executive gift realizing the normal beauty of everything, Recognition of it is intuitive.imaginatively sets it forth. He detects it even within the abnormal gloom and deformity imposed by chance and condition, helps it to struggle to the light, restores it—I may say—to consonance with the beauty of the universal soul. This being partly comprehensible through empiricism and logical analysis, men of talent and of little insight produce tolerable work by means of trained æsthetic judgment. But no art, no poetry, is a distinctive addition to the world's stores unless its first conception be intuitive; then only it is a fresh expression of the universal beauty through one of its select interpreters. Like all things else it comes to us from Jove.

Even Véron is compelled to assume the element which he denies. When he begins toThe schools. illustrate and to criticise, he instantly talks of "the perfection of parts." The despotism of established art systems springs from this perfection,—the academic sway of the antique and of Raphaelitism. Much of this discussion belongs to metaphysical æsthetics, and some persons may think these notions antiquated. We know little of these things absolutely. We know not the esoteric truth in matters of art or nature,—otherwise the schools at once would cease their controversies. As it happens, certain of the latest physicists claim that "deduced facts"—that is, the objects inferred from our sensations—are the true substantialities; that only our perception of them is transient; that the world of subjective feelings is the chimera, not the objective matters which excite perception.

One question you very properly may ask: "WhyWhere danger lies. not take all this for granted, and go on? Join either side, and the result is the same. Eclipses were calculated readily enough upon the Ptolemaic method." Not so. The theory that beauty is a chimera leads to an arrogant contempt for it on the part of many artists and poets, who substitute that which is bizarre and audacious for that which has enduring charm. It begins with irreverence, and leads to discordant taste; to something far beneath the excellence of noble literatures and of great plastic and poetic eras.

The tentative revolts that break forth in art and"The old order changeth." letters are against methods to which, however fine they be and grounded in nature, the world has become too servile. Movements in poetry, like those of Blake and Whitman and Lanier for greater rhythmical freedom, of the Rossettians for a study of Preraphaelite methods, of Banville and Dobson for a restoration of attractive forms; movements in art like those of Monticelli and Claude Monet,—all these are to some extent the quest for values so long unwonted that they seem new; and thus art returns upon its circuit and the wisdom of the Preacher is reaffirmed. Still, every race has its culminating or concurrent ideal of beauty, Development of racial and national ideals.which is affected, again, by the conditions of life in the different regions of the race's establishment. Each nation, like a rose-tree, draws from the soil and air its strength, and wealth, and material sustenance; it puts forth branches, and leaves, and sturdy thorns, and battles with the elements and with the thicket that hems it in; finally, with all its hardier growth assured, it breaks into flower, it develops an ideal; its own and perfect rose of beauty marks the culmination, the intent, the absolute fulfilment, of its creative existence. Thus the ideals of Grecian art and song doubtless represent the South, and those of the Gothic or romantic the North, in Europe; and the two include the rarest of our Aryan types. In art, these haveUltimate standards. resulted in various academic standards the excellence of which cannot be discredited. Pater has rightly said that it is vulgar to ignore the "form" of the one, and vulgar to underrate the "substance" of the other. The charm of the Perfection of the antique.antique, for instance, is so celestial that, supposing we had been deprived of it hitherto and were suddenly to be introduced to it through discovery of a new continent, the children of art would go wild over its perfection. The very artists who now revolt from it would in that case break from other standards and lead a revolt in its favor, and a momentous progress in art and song would be recorded. As it is, we are intellectually aware of its nobility; but anon our sense of delight in it is blunted,—we have no zest in its repetition, being to the manner born. Zest is the sensation most Fashion. Cp. "Poets of America": pp. 273, 274.worth possessing. The eager student instinct is right in essaying discovery and revival, since only thus can zest be sustained, and, for the sake of this, occasional changes even to fashions of minor worth are not to be scouted. The element of strangeness itself conveys a peculiar effect of beauty. This, by the way, is the strength of the Grotesque, a subordinate form of art and at its best accessory.

You will observe that after most revolts the Renaissance.schools go back, in time, to certain ideals,—to those which become academic because the highest. They recover zest for these, having wearied of some passing fashion or revival. An occasional separation is not a bad thing, after all, in friendship, art, or marriage. Thus it was that the classic Renaissance of Italy reopened a world of beauty, and began a fresh creative period, in which new styles of painting, moulding, architecture arose, different from the antique, but inspired by it, and possible because the spirit of beauty itself was reborn.

We constantly have illustrations of the dependence of artistic zest upon the stimulus of novelty. Some of you possibly were brought up in our old towns and in those old houses where architecture, furniture, wall-paper, were all "in keeping." Another illustration: the "Colonial" revival.How prim and monotonous it then seemed, and how a lad longed to get away from it! Citified folk long since got away, and with zest, to something vastly inferior,—to something with no style at all. At last the Colonial and Revolutionary homestead styles became rare to find in their integrity. Now we see a restoration of them; now we rediscover their lightness and fitness,—their beauty,—and are reviving them in all departments of taste; until, in fact, as I recently heard an artist break forth, "there is a great deal of taste,—and some of it is good!" It may be that another generation will tire of them, as we did, though it seems heresy to say so now.

For a long time after 1775, Sir Joshua Reynolds stood, in his work and "Discourses," as a Academic art.representative exponent of the academic. One must remember that he had no light task in promoting taste among his Anglo-Saxons; their race is not endowed with the intuitive Southern perception of the beautiful. The English acquire their artistic taste intellectually, except in landscape-gardening, although their poets seem to be even more noble (perhaps because more intellectual) than those of nations whose sense of material beauty Sir Joshua Reynolds.is congenital. Sir Joshua was a good deal of a poet with his brush. The chief of academi , he had a touch, a lovely feeling, an impressiveness of his own. When he sought a foundation for his discourses upon art, he wisely went to the best ideals known to him. His lectures are in the main sound; no artist, even a recanter, can afford not to read them; yet the attempt to carry them out almost confirmed the English School in "correct," rigid, and lifeless methods. And why? Because Sir Joshua, an original painter in his studio, in his teachings did not sufficiently allow for and inculcate a local, climatic, racial divergence from his revered Italian models.

Now, the Indo-European ideals of beauty usually Diverse ideals of another people.have been the foundation of academic theoretics upon art, just as they are interwrought, in sooth, with English poetry, and with the great criticism thereon,—from Lamb and Coleridge to Dryden and Arnold and Lowell. But what would Sir Joshua Reynolds have made of the extreme antipodal type, that of those Asiatic Greeks,—our delightful Japanese? To be sure, there were Indian and Chinese cults, but these were merely capricious and accessory, and not pursued to any just appreciation of their ideals. Here, then, inThe Japanese. Japan is a race developed under distinctive biological conditions, with types of art and life almost the reverse of our own, yet perfectly consistent throughout, and—as we now see—superior to those of Western civilization in more than one department. Its ideals are just as perfect as those of the Greeks or Goths, yet absolutely different. Here we indeed enter a new world. Ideal beauty plainly lies in adaptation of the spirit to Fitness, material and spiritual.the circumstances, though not always to the apparent material exigencies. La Farge, whom I have before quoted,—and upon the subject of beauty the sayings of a painter or an architect (mutatis mutandis) apply just as fully to poetry as to his own art,—La Farge says, in speaking of the adaptation of Japanese buildings to resistance against earthquakes, that

"like all true art, the architecture of Japan has found in the necessities imposed upon it the motives for realizing beauty, and has adorned the means by which it has conquered the difficulties to be surmounted."

No better illustration could be given of the relations of fitness and beauty; but he soon has occasion to add:—

"Everywhere the higher architecture, embodied in shrines and temples, is based on some ideal needs, and not essentially upon necessities."

We see, then, every people recognizing an extra-mundane conception of beauty, founded in the spirit of man, and this again conforms itself to the spirit of each race. Through it the poets become creative rather than adaptive,—the beauty of their imaginings coming from within, just as the beauty of nature is the efflux of the universal spirit. So far as human artists share the Divinity of that spirit, their interpretations give it form to human eyes, melody to human ears, and imagery and feeling therewithal to move the recipient. It seems, then, I say, the lot of each nation, as if an individual, and Specific evolution.of each period, as if a modish season, to discover the beauty conformed both to general laws and to specific needs and impulse; to create, moreover, its proper forms in every art, thus making new contributions to the world's thesaurus of poetry and design. This is acknowledged by all, as concerns the every-day art of dress. A Japanese gentleman is dignified in his national costume; his wife and daughters are charming in their clinging and curving robes. Attire them—and that is the shameful thing which our invasion is effecting—in the dapper broadcloth, the Parisian gown, and their comeliness often is gone. A pitiful incongruity is apt to take its place. I believe that such a race as theirs also develops its fine arts, manners, government, literature,—yes, even religion,—to its foreordained capacity; that if you force or coax it to adopt the modes of a divergent people, you sound the death-knell of its fair individuality. If the tempter race is the superior, the one that surrenders its own ideals is doomed to be absorbed,—at least, to lose its national distinction. Possibly with the progressive What distant goal?modern intercourse of peoples a general blending is to result. Languages, arts, races, may react upon one another and produce a cosmic mongrelism. If this is according to the law of progress, something grand will come out of it, a planetary and imposing style. But during centuries of transition the gradual loss of national individualities will seem pathetic indeed. Something of this passed through my mind as I watched, half sorrowful and half amused, an accomplished Japanese lady, the adopted daughter of an American, yielding to the influence of our Western ideals. A natural artist, like so many of her blood, she is impressible by beauty of a novel type. As far as personal The assimilative process.experience is concerned, she doubtless adds to the worth of her own life by assimilating the results of an art no more perfect in its kind than the decorative—and therefore secondary—art of her own race, yet one far beyond the power of her race to originate, or to pursue in competition with its originators. Therefore it seemed almost a pity to find her at work upon a lesson from the Art Students' League, copying in crayon an antique Apollo, with deft fingers, which to my thinking should be tracing designs in lacquer or in cloisonné on bronze, or painting some group of Japanese men and maidens, in their flexible costume, by the bayside, on a terrace, with herons stalking among sacred lilies in the near distance, and the eternal peak of Fujiyama meeting the blue sky beyond.

Meanwhile our present standard of beauty is the European, with modifications. To comprehend any other you must enter into its spirit by adoption, by a certain naturalization; until then you will find it Taste is congenital yet cultivable.as hard to master as the idioms of a language not your own. These seem grotesque and childish until you speak, even think, in their tongue without mentally translating it. A translation will give you the imagination, action, thought, of a poem, for instance, but not its native and essential beauty. Æsthetics relate to the primal sense, and must be taken at first hand. This is all the truth there is in the maxim De gustibus. If the rays of our sun were as green as those of the star β Libræ, beauty would exist and have its standard in conformity. Taste would be as intuitive as now, and just as open to cultivation.

These general principles should entitle us to our Poetic beauty.surmise respecting the ultimate value of a poem. A mode attractive for its novelty may be only the vogue of a generation, or of a brief season. I take endurance to be the test of art. History will show, I think, that if a poem had not the element of beauty, this potency in art, its force could not endure. Beauty partakes of eternal youth and conveys its own immortality. Passion and imagination intensify much of the poetry that has survived; but under their stress the poet summons beauty to his aid. Wisdom and morals do not so inevitably take Its conserving power.on grace: their statements, impressive at the time, must be recast perpetually. The law of natural selection conserves artistic beauty in the poem as in the bird and butterfly. Besides, just as gems and gold are hoarded while iron is left to rust, and as paintings that are beautiful in line and color grow costlier with time, so the poetry that has the beauty of true art becomes the heirloom of generations. For beauty seems to consecrate both makers and possessors. Just as all the world clings to the legends of Helen and Cleopatra and Mary Stuart, so it has a fondness for the Cellinis and Villons and Marlowes and Lovelaces,—the ne'er-do-weels of art and song. This is because it reads the artist's higher self in his work; there alone it is expressed, and we give him credit for it. The truth of fairy tales is that of beauty; the Florizels and Cinderellas and Percinets are its ideals. Beauty loves the Beast, but the Beast is beauty in disguise. Thus creative taste holds the key to the future, and art for art's sake is a sound motto in so far as beauty is a legitimate end of art. That it is not the sole end of art—life is the lesson of Tennyson's "The Palace of Art." One who thought otherwise at last found need to throw her royal robes away: