that is, invent, has his name for nothing, ” another group contends
that it is not the invention but the artistic treatment, the
form, which determines whether an imaginative writer is a poet
or a writer of prose-contends, in short, that emotion is the
basis of all true poetic expression, whatever be the subject matter,
that thoughts must be expressed in an emotional manner
before they can be brought into poetry, and that this emotive
expression demands even yet something else, viz. style and
form.
Although many critics are now agreed that “ L'art est une forme, ” that without metre and without form there can be no The, mpon poetry, there are few who would contend that poetry renee of can exist by virtue of any one of these alone, or 1d“S-H" even by virtue of all these combined. Quite inde"“"""° pendent of verbal melody, though mostly accompanying it, and quite independent of “ composition, ” there is an atmosphere floating around the poet through which he sees everything, an atmosphere which stamps his utterances as poetry; for instance, among all the versifiers contemporary with Donne there was none so rugged as he occasionally was, and yet such songs as “ Sweetest love, I do not go for weariness of thee ” prove how true a poet he was whenever he could master those technicalities which far inferior poets find comparatively easy. While rhythm may to a very considerable degree be acquired (though, of course, the highest rhythmical effects never can), the power of looking at the world through the atmosphere that floats before the poet's eyes is not to be learned and not to be taught. This atmosphere is what we call poetic imagination. But first it seems necessary to say a word or two upon that high temper of the soul which in truly great poetry gives birth to this poetic imagination.
The “message ” of poetry must be more unequivocal, more thoroughly accentuated, than that of any of the other fine arts. With regard to modern poetry, indeed, it may almost be said that if any writer's verse embodies a message, true, direct and pathetic, we cannot stay to inquire too curiously about the degree of artistic perfection with which it is delivered, for Wordsworth's saying “That which comes from the heart goes to the heart ” applies very closely indeed to modern poetry. The most truly passionate poet in Greece was no doubt in a deep sense the most artistic poet; but in her case art and passion were one, and that is why she has been so cruelly misunderstood. The most truly passionate nature, and perhaps the greatest soul, that in recent years has expressed itself in English verse is Elizabeth Barrett Browning; at least it is certain that, with the single exception of Hood in the “ Song of the Shirt, ” no writer of the 10th century really touched English hearts with a hand so powerful as hersand this notwithstanding violations of poetic form, or defective rhymes, such as would appal some of the contemporary versifiers of England and France “ who lisp in numbers for the numbers and nothing elsel come.” The truth is that in order to produce poetry the soul must for the time being have reached that state of exaltation, that state of freedom from self-consciousness, depicted in the lines:-
“ I started once, or seemed to start, in pain, Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak, As when a great thought strikes along the brain, And flushes all the cheek.”
Whatsoever may be the poet's “ knowledge of his art, ” into this mood he must always pass before he can write a truly poetic line. For, notwithstanding all that may be said upon poetry as a fine art, it is in the deepest sense of the word an “ inspiration.” No man can write a line of genuine poetry without having been “ born again ” (or, as the true rendering of the text says, “ born from above ”); and then the mastery over those highest reaches of form which are beyond the ken of the mere versifier comes to him as a result of the change. Hence, with all Mrs Browning's metrical blemishes, the splendour of her metrical triumphs at her best.
For what is the deep distinction between poet and proseman? A writer may be many things besides a poet; he may bc a warrior like Aeschylus, a man of business like Shakespeare, a courtier 879
like Chaucer, or a cosmopolitan philosopher like Goethe; but the moment the poetic mood is upon him all the trappings of the world with which for years he may perhaps have been clothing his soul-the world's knowingness, its cynicism, its self-seeking, its ambition-fall away, and the man becomes an inspired child again, with ears attuned to nothing but the whispers of those spirits from the Golden Age, who, according to Hesiod, haunt and bless the degenerate earth. What such a man produces may greatly delight and astonish his readers, yet not so greatly as it delights and astonishes himself. His passages of pathos draw no tears so deep or so sweet as those that fall from his own eyes while he writes; his sublime passages overawe no soul so imperiously as his own; his humour draws no laughter so rich or so deep as that stirred within his own breast. It might almost be said, indeed, that Sincerity and Conscience, the two angels that bring to the poet the wonders of the poetic dream, bring him also the deepest, truest delight of form. It might almost be said that by aid of sincerity and conscience the poet is enabled to see more clearly than other men the eternal limits of his own art-to see with Sophocles that nothing, not even poetry itself, is of any worth to man, invested as he is by the whole army of evil, unless it is in the deepest and highest sense good, unless it comes linking us all together by closer bonds of sympathy and pity, strengthening us to fight the foes with whom fate and even Nature, the mother who bore us, sometimes seem in league-to see with Milton that the high quality of man's soul which in English is expressed by the word virtue is greater than even the great poem he prized, greater than all the rhythms of all the tongues that have been spoken since Babeland to see with Shakespeare and with Shelley that the high passion which in English is called love is lovelier than all art, lovelier than all the marble Mercuries that “ await the chisel of the sculptor ” in all the marble hills.
2. What Position does Poetry take up in Relation to the other Arts?-Notwithstanding the labours of Lessing and his followers, the position accorded by criticism to poetry in poem, ,B relation to the other arts has never been so uncertain Relatlanlb and anomalous as in recent years. On the one hand U10 0111" there are critics who, judging from their perpetual Ms comparison of poems to pictures, claim her as a sort of handmaid of painting and sculpture. On the other hand the disciples of Wagner, while professing to do homage to poetry, have claimed her as the handmaid of music. With regard to the relations of poetry to painting and sculpture, it seems necessary to glance for a moment at the saying of Simonides, as recorded by Plutarch, that poetry is a speaking picture and that painting is a mute poetry. It appears to have had upon modern criticism as much influence since the publication of Lessing's Laoeoon as it had before. Perhaps it is in some measure answerable for the modern vice of excessive word-painting. Beyond this one saying, there is little or nothing in Greek literature to show that the Greeks recognized between poetry and the plastic and pictorial arts an aliinity closer than that which exists between poetry and music and dancing. Understanding artistic methods more profoundly than the moderns, and far too profoundly to suppose that there is any special and peculiar affinity between an art whose medium of expression is marble and an art whose medium of expression is a growth of oral symbols, the Greeks seem to have studied poetry not so much in its relation to painting and sculpture as in its relation to music and dancing. It is matter of familiar knowledge, for instance, that at the Dionysian poet as “teacher of the chorus”
prize was awarded, even though the
were Aeschylus himself or Sophocles.
the relation of poetry to music is
causes of the superiority of Greek to
festival it was to the
(xopootédaxakos) that the
“teacher of the chorus ”
And this recognition of
perhaps one of the many
all other poetry in adapting artistic means to artistic ends. In Greek poetry, even in Homer's description of the shield of Achilles, even in the famous description by Sophocles of his native woods in the Oedipus eoloneus, such word-painting as occurs seems, if not inevitable and unconscious, so alive with imaginative feeling as to become part and parcel ot the
