The Poet's Poet Part 30

Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein, _Preludes_.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of man." [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.]

We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to suicide. Poetry may be comforting without being illusive. Emerson says,

'Tis the privilege of art Thus to play its cheerful part Man on earth to acclimate And bend the exile to his fate.

[Footnote: _Art_.]

It is not, obviously, Emerson's conception that the poetry which brings this about falsifies. Like most poets, he indicates that art accomplishes its end, not merely by obscuring the hideous accidents of life, but by enabling us to glimpse an ideal element which abides in it, and is its essence.

Is the essence of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so const.i.tutionally Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly Aristotelians.

Plato seems to say that ideality is not, as a matter of fact, the essence of objects. It is a light reflected upon them, as the sun's light is reflected upon the moon. So he claims that the artist who portrays life is like one who, drawing a picture of the moon, gives usonly a map of her craters, and misses entirely the only thing that gives the moon any meaning, that is, moonlight. But the poet, that lover of the sensuous, cannot quite accept such a view as this. Ideality is truly the essence of objects, he avers, though it is overlaid with a ma.s.s of meaningless material. Hence the poet who gives us a representation of things is not obscuring them, but is doing us a service by simplifying them, and so making their ideality clearer. All that the most idealistic poet need do is to imitate; as Mrs. Browning says,

Paint a body well, You paint a soul by implication.

[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

This firm faith that the sensual is the dwelling-place of the spiritual accounts for the poet's impatience with the contention that his art is useless unless he points a lesson, by manipulating his materials toward a conscious moral end. The poet refuses to turn objects this way and that, until they catch a reflection from a separate moral world. If he tries to write with two distinct purposes, hoping to "suffice the eye and save the soul beside," [Footnote: _The Ring and the Book_.] as Browning puts it, he is apt to hide the intrinsic spirituality of things under a cloak of ready-made moral conceptions. In his moments of deepest insight the poet is sure that his one duty is to reveal beauty clearly, without troubling himself about moralizing, and he a.s.sures his readers,

If you get simple beauty and naught else, You get about the best thing G.o.d invents.

[Footnote: _Fra, Lippo Lippi_.]

Probably poets have always felt, in their hearts, what the radicals of the present day are saying so vehemently, that the poet should not be expected to sermonize: "I wish to state my firm belief," says Amy Lowell, "that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is created beauty." [Footnote: Preface to _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_. See also Joyce Kilmer, Letter to Howard W.

Cook, June 28, 1918.]

Even conceding that the ideal lives within the sensual, it may seem that the poet is too sanguine in his claim that he is able to catch the ideal and significant feature of a thing rather than its accidents. Why should this be? Apparently because his thirst is for balance, proportion, harmony--what you will--leading him to see life as a unity.

The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as

A many-sided mirror, Which could distort to many a shape of error This true, fair world of things.

[Footnote: Sh.e.l.ley, _Prometheus Unbound_.]

It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him irrefutable proof that the intuition that leads him to see things in this way is not leading him astray. James Russell Lowell has described the poet's achievement:

With a sorrowful and conquering beauty, The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes.

[Footnote: _Ode_.]

"The soul of all," that is the artist's revelation. To him the world is truly a universe, not a heterogeneity of unrelated things. In different mode from Lowell, Mrs. Browning expresses the same conception of the artist's imitation of life, inquiring,

What is art But life upon the larger scale, the higher, When, graduating up a spiral line Of still expanding and ascending gyres It pushes toward the intense significance Of all things, hungry for the infinite.

[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

The poet cannot accept Plato's characterization of him as an imitator, then, not if this implies that his imitations are inferior to their objects. Rather, the poet proudly maintains, they are infinitely superior, being in fact closer approximations to the meaning of things than are the things themselves. Thus Sh.e.l.ley describes the poet's work:

He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality.

[Footnote: _Prometheus Unbound_.]

Therefore the poet has usually claimed for himself the t.i.tle, not of imitator, but of seer. To his purblind readers, who see men as trees walking, he is able, with the search-light of his genius, to reveal the essential forms of things. Mrs. Browning calls him "the speaker of essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative and temporal truth"; [Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.] James Russell Lowell calls him "the discoverer and revealer of the perennial under the deciduous"; [Footnote: _The Function of the Poet_.] Emerson calls him "the only teller of news." [Footnote: _Poetry and Imagination_. The following are some of the poems a.s.serting that the poet is the speaker of ideal truth: Blake, _Hear the Voice of the Ancient Bard;_ Montgomery, _A Theme for a Poet;_ Bowles, _The Visionary Boy;_ Wordsworth, _Personal Talk;_ Coleridge, _To Wm. Wordsworth;_ Arnold, _The Austerity of Poetry;_ Rossetti, _Sonnet, Sh.e.l.ley;_ Bulwer Lytton, _The Dispute of the Poets;_ Mrs. Browning, _Pan is Dead;_ Landor, _To Wordsworth_; Jean Ingelow, _The Star's Monument_; Tupper, _Wordsworth_; Tennyson, _The Poet_; Swinburne, _The Death of Browning_ (Sonnet V), _A New Year's Ode_; Edmund Gosse, _Epilogue_; James Russell Lowell, Sonnets XIV and XV on _Wordsworth's Views of Capital Punishment_; Bayard Taylor, _For the Bryant Festival_; Emerson, _Saadi_; M. Clemmer, _To Emerson_; Warren Holden, _Poetry_; P. H. Hayne, _To Emerson_; Edward Dowden, _Emerson_; Lucy Larcom, _R. W. Emerson_; R. C. Robbins, _Emerson_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; G. E. Woodberry, _Ode at the Emerson Centenary_; Bliss Carman, _In a Copy of Browning_; John Drinkwater, _The Loom of the Poets_; Richard Middleton, _To an Idle Poet_; Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poet Sees that Truth and Pa.s.sion are One_.]

Here we are, then, at the real point of dispute between the philosopher and the poet. They claim the same vantage-point from which to overlook human life. One would think they might peacefully share the same pinnacle, but as a matter of fact they are continuously jostling one another. In vain one tries to quiet their contentiousness. Turning to the most deeply Platonic poets of our period--Coleridge, Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, Arnold, Emerson,--one may inquire, Does not your description of the poet precisely tally with Plato's description of the philosopher?

Yes, they aver, but Plato falsified when he named his seer a philosopher rather than a poet. [Footnote: In rare cases, the poet identifies himself with the philosopher. See Coleridge, _The Garden of Boccaccio_; Kirke White, _Lines Written on Reading Some of His Own Earlier Sonnets_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; George E. Woodberry, _Agathon_.] Surely if the quarrel may be thus reduced to a matter of terminology, it grows trivial, but let us see how the case stands.

From one approach the dispute seems to arise from a comparison of methods. Coleridge praises the truth of Wordsworth's poetry as being

Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes.

[Footnote: _To William Wordsworth_.]

Wordsworth himself boasts over the laborious investigator of facts,

Think you, mid all this mighty sum Of things forever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, We must be ever seeking?

[Footnote: _Expostulation and Reply_.]

But the dispute goes deeper than mere method. The poet's immediate intuition is superior to the philosopher's toilsome research, he a.s.serts, because it captures ideality alive, whereas the philosopher can only kill and dissect it. As Wordsworth phrases it, poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impa.s.sioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." Philosophy is useful to the poet only as it presents facts for his synthesis; Sh.e.l.ley states, "Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." [Footnote: _A Defense of Poetry_.]

To this the philosopher may rejoin that poetry, far from making discoveries beyond the bourne of philosophy, is a mere popularization, a sugar-coating, of the philosopher's discoveries. Tolstoi contends,

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion. And thus a false activity of science inevitably causes a correspondingly false activity of art. [Footnote: _What is Art?_]

Such criticisms have sometimes incensed the poet till he has refused to acknowledge any indebtedness to the dissecting hand of science, and has p.r.o.nounced the philosopher's att.i.tude of mind wholly antagonistic to poetry.

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, [Footnote: _Lamia_.]

Keats once complained. "Sleep in your intellectual crust!" [Footnote: _A Poet's Epitaph_.]

Wordsworth contemptuously advised the philosopher, and not a few other poets have felt that philosophy deadens life as a crust of ice deadens a flowing stream. That reason kills poetry is the unoriginal theme of a recent poem. The poet scornfully characterizes present writers,

We are they who dream no dreams, Singers of a rising day, Who undaunted, Where the sword of reason gleams, Follow hard, to hew away The woods enchanted.

[Footnote: E. Flecker, _Donde Estan_.]

One must turn to Poe for the clearest statement of the antagonism. He declares,

Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes, Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek for shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green gra.s.s, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree?

[Footnote: _To Science_.]

If this sort of complaint is characteristic of poets, how shall the philosopher refrain from charging them with falsehood? The poet's hamadryad and naiad, what are they, indeed, but cobwebby fictions, which must be brushed away if ideal truth is to be revealed? Critics of the poet like to point out that Shakespeare frankly confessed,

Most true it is that I have looked on truth Askance and strangely,

and that a renegade artist of the nineteenth century admitted, "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."

[Footnote: Oscar Wilde, _The Decay of Lying_.] If poets complain that all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy, [Footnote: _Lamia_.]

are they not admitting that their vaunted revelations are mere ghosts of distorted facts, and that they themselves are merely accomplished liars?

In his reb.u.t.tal the poet makes a good case for himself. He has identified the philosopher with the scientist, he says, and rightly, for the philosopher, the seeker for truth alone, can never get beyond the realm of science. His quest of absolute truth will lead him, first, to the delusive rigidity of scientific cla.s.sification, then, as he tries to make his cla.s.sification complete, it will topple over like a lofty tower of child's blocks, into the original chaos of things.

What! the philosopher may retort, the poet speaks thus of truth, who has just exalted himself as the supreme truth-teller, the seer? But the poet answers that his truth is not in any sense identical with that of the scientist and the philosopher. Not everything that exists is true for the poet, but only that which has beauty. Therefore he has no need laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this subject are Sh.e.l.ley, _A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_; Mrs. Browning, _Pan Is Dead_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; Madison Cawein, _Prototypes_.] If Poe's rejection of