Chapter 2

We have arrived at this, then; that Poetry's chief function is to reconcile the inner harmony of Man (his Soul, as we call it) with the outer harmony of the Universe. With this conception of "peerless Poesie" in our minds, we turn to Aristotle's _Poetics_, and it gives us a sensible shock to read on the first page, that "Epic Poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic Poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the lyre are all, generally speaking, modes of imitation" ([Greek: _pasai tynchhanoysin ohysai mimhêseis to hynolon_]). "What?" we say--"Nothing better than _that_?"--for "imitation" has a bad name among men and is apt to suggest the ape. But, first bearing in mind that there are imitations and imitations (the _Imitatio Christi_ among them), let us go on to see what it is that in Aristotle's opinion Poetry imitates or copies. It is "the Universal" ([Greek: _tho chathholoy_]): and as soon as we realise this we know ourselves to be on the same track as Aristotle, after all. "Imitation," as he uses it, is not an apish or a slavish imitation; it is no mere transcribing or copying of phenomena as they pass (he even allows that the poet may "imitate" men as "better than they are"): it is an expressing, in fiction and harmonious speech, intelligible to his fellow-men, of what truth, order, harmony, and "law" the poet's mind has apprehended in the outer Universe. No fair-minded reader of the _Poetics_, as he lays down the treatise, will doubt that this, or something like this, was Aristotle's meaning, nor is it probable that he will find any essential difference (or any difference that seriously disturbs agreement) between Aristotle's "Universal" and the Platonic "Idea" or pattern of things "laid up somewhere in the heavens."

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Now the Poet's way of apprehending the Universal is (as I have indicated) by keeping true to himself, attending to his soul's inner harmony, and listening, waiting, brooding with a "wise passiveness" until the moment when his and the larger harmony fall into tune together. The Psalmist describes the process accurately: "While I was thus musing the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue." "Poetry," writes Shelley, "is not, like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, _I will compose poetry_. The greatest poet, even, cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness." But the Poet's way of reporting these apprehensions to his fellows, since he deals with Universals or ideas, is by "universalising" or "idealising" his story: and upon these two terms, which properly mean much the same thing, we must pause for a moment.

The word "idealise," which is the more commonly used, has unfortunately two meanings, a true and a false; and, again unfortunately, the false prevails in vulgar use. To "idealise" in the true sense is to disengage an "idea" of all that is trivial or impertinent or transient or disturbing, and present it to men in its clearest outline, so that its own proper form shines in on the intelligence, as you would wipe away from a discovered statue all stains or accretions of mud or moss or fungus, to release and reveal its true beauty. False "idealising," on the other hand, means that, instead of trusting to this naked manifestation, we add to it some graces of our invention, some touches by which we think to improve it; that we "paint the lily," in short. But the true "idealisation" and the first business of the poet is a _denuding_ not an _investing_ of the Goddess, whether her name be "Life," "Truth," "Beauty," or what you will: a revealing, not a coverture of embroidered words, however pretty and fantastic; as has been excellently said by Shelley: "A poem _is the very image of life expressed in its external truth_. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the erection of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds." Let us enforce this account of the true idealisation by a verse or two of our old friend Sir John Davies (quoted by Coleridge in his _Biographia Literaria_). "What an unworldly mass of impressions the mind would be," says Sir John in effect, "did not the soul come to the rescue and reduce these crowding bodies by 'sublimation strange.'"--

_From their gross Matter she abstracts the Forms, And draws a kind of Quintessence from things, Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings. This doth She when from things particular She doth abstract the Universal kinds...._

But it is time to descend from these heights (such as they are) of philosophising, and illustrate the difference between true and false "idealising" in Poetry by concrete example: and no two better examples occur to me, for drawing this contrast, than Webster's _Duchess of Malfy_ and Shakespeare's _Macbeth_. Each of these plays excites horror and is calculated to excite horror; both have outlived three hundred years, there or thereabouts; both may be taken as having established an indefinitely long lease on men's admiration--but to any critical mind, how different an admiration! Webster is an expert, a _virtuoso_ in horrifics; in flesh-creeping effects lies his skill; and, indulging that skill, he not only paints the lily, but repaints it and daubs it yet a third time. There is no reason on earth--she has offended against no moral law on earth or in the heavens--that could possibly condemn the Duchess to the hellish tortures she is made to endure. At the worst she has married a man beneath her in station. To punish her in Webster's extravagant fashion every other character, with the whole story of the play, has to be dehumanised. To me--as I penetrate the Fourth Act--the whole business becomes ludicrous: not sanely comic, or even quite sanely absurd: but bizarre, and ridiculously bizarre at that. It has no "idea" at all, no relation to the Universal in the shape of any moral order, "law," fate, doom, destiny. It is just a box of tricks, of raw heads and bloody bones, left with the lid open. That is false "idealising"; Webster choosing his effect and "improving" it for all he was worth--which (let it be added) was a great deal.

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Turn from _The Duchess of Malfy_ to _Macbeth_, and you find an English poet as sensitive of fate, doom, destiny, "law," the moral order, as ever was Aeschylus; nay, interpreting it perhaps more effectively than ever did Aeschylus. In the First Act we see it suggested to Macbeth by witchcraft (which is the personified foe of moral order) that he can achieve an ambition by an unlawful path, the ambition itself being suggested along with the way to it and growing as the way opens. We see them both communicated to a feminine mind, narrower, more intent and practical; because narrower, because more intent and practical, for the moment more courageous. (It was Eve that the Serpent, wily enough, selected to tempt.) Both Macbeth and his lady move to the deed under a law which--for a while--has usurped the true moral order and reversed it, he not without misgivings: the spectators all the while knowing the true order, yet held silent, watching the event. Outside the castle an owl hoots as Duncan is slain. The guilty man and woman creep back, whispering; and thereupon--what happens? A knocking on the door--a knocking followed by the growls of a drowsy if not drunken porter: "Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. (Knocking again.) Knock, knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of Beëlzebub?" The stage direction admits Macduff, who in due course is to prove the avenger of blood: but the hand that knocks, the step on the threshold, are in truth those of the moral order returning _pede claudo_, demanding to be readmitted. From the instant of that first knock the ambitions of the pair roll back toward their doom as the law they have offended reasserts itself, and the witches' palindrome _In girum imus noctu, ecce!_ steadily spells itself backward, letter by letter, to the awful sentence, _Ecce ut consumimur igni!_

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This is to "idealise" in the right sense of the word. Fixing his mind on the Idea of two human beings, a man and a woman who trespass from the law of the great moral powers ordering the Universe (Man along with it) and are overtaken in that trespass and punished, Shakespeare disencumbers it of all that is trivial, irrelevant, non-essential. He takes the wickedest crime of which man can be guilty; not a mere naked murder, nor even a murder for profit, but the murder of a king by his sworn soldier, of a guest by his host, of a sleeping guest by the hand on which he has just bestowed a diamond. Can criminality be laid barer? He illustrates it again in two persons lifted above the common station; and he does this not (as I think) for the practical reason for which Aristotle seems to commend it to tragic writers--that the disasters of great persons are more striking than those of the small fry of mankind--that, as the height is, so will be the fall--or not for that reason alone; but, still in the process of "idealising," because such persons, exalted above the obscuring petty cares of life, may reasonably be expected to see the Universe with a clearer vision than ours, to have more delicate ears for its harmonies. Who but a King should know most concerning moral law? Why is he with our consent lifted up so that he may hear the divine commandments better than we, and dictate them down to us? He is greater, but yet--and this is the point--_a man like ourselves_ ([Greek: _omoios_]). He cannot for purposes of tragedy be wholly good: for not only is this extremely rare in real life, and almost inconceivable, but the ruin of a wholly good man would merely shock, without teaching us anything. The disaster of a tragic figure must come, and be seen to come, through some fault--or, at least, some mistake--of his own. But again he must not be wholly bad, for the disasters of the wholly bad do not affect us save with disgust. Such men, we know, are not _like ourselves_. What happens to them may serve for _The Police News_. Tragedy does not deal with the worthless. How then are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, beings like ourselves, to fall into crime so heinous? Again Shakespeare strips the Idea bare: their trespass comes through ambition, "last infirmity of noble minds," under the blinding persuasion of witchcraft, which (an actual belief in Shakespeare's time) is a direct negation of the moral law, and puts Satan in place of God.

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It is curious that, some thirty-odd years after Shakespeare had handled this tremendous theme, another attempt on it was being meditated, and by the man whom the most of us rank next after Shakespeare in the hierarchy of English poets. Among the treasures in the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, lies a manuscript, the hand-writing undoubtedly Milton's, containing a list compiled by him of promising subjects for the great poem for which, between his leaving the University and the outbreak of the Civil War, all his life was a deliberate preparation. The list is long; the subjects proposed run to no fewer than ninety-nine. Of these, fifty-three are derived from Old Testament history (with a recurring inclination for the theme of _Paradise Lost_), eight from the New Testament; thirty-three from the history of Britain (with a leaning towards the Arthurian legend); while five of them are legendary tales of Scotland or North Britain, the last being headed "Macbeth. Beginning at the arrival of Malcolm at Macduff. The matter of Duncan may be expressed by the arrival of his ghost." Now that Milton (an adorer of Shakespeare's genius, as everyone knows) should have taken so deep an impression from the play that its theme possessed him and he longed to transfer it to _Epic_, is credible enough. That he, with his classical bent, should choose to attempt in Drama an improvement upon the most "classical" of all Shakespeare's tragedies seems to me scarcely credible. But if the credibility of this be granted, then I can only conceive Milton's designing to improve the play by making it yet more "classical," _i.e._ by writing it (after the fashion he followed in _Samson Agonistes_) closely upon the model of Athenian Tragedy.

For my part I always consider Milton's _Macbeth_ the most fascinating poem--certainly, if play it were, the most fascinating play--ever unwritten. But of this any man may be sure; that (since they were both great poets) one made, as the other would have made, a story of far more value to us than Shakespeare or Milton or any man before or after could have made by a strict biography of Macbeth, the man as he lived. For any such biography would clog the lesson for us with details which were more the less irrelevant because they really happened. Here I must quote Aristotle again, and for the last time in this little book: but no sentences in his treatise hold a deeper import than these:--

"It is not the function of the Poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen of likelihood or must happen of necessity. The Poet and the Historian are not different because one writes in verse and the other in prose. Turn what Herodotus tells into verse, and none the less it will be a sort of history; the metre makes no difference. The real difference lies in the Historian's telling what has happened, the Poet's telling what may happen. _Thus Poetry is a more philosophical thing, and a more serious, than History: for Poetry tells of the Universal, History of the Particular_. Now the business of the Universal is to tell us how it will fall to such and such a person to speak or act in such or such circumstances according to likelihood or necessity: and it is at this that Poetry aims in giving characters names of its own: whereas the Particular narrates what Alcibiades did or what happened to him."

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This may seem a hard saying, even after what has been said. So let us pause and digest it in Sir Philip Sidney's comment: "... Thus farre Aristotle, which reason of his (as all his) is most full of reason. For indeed, if the question were whether it were better to have a particular acte truly or falsely set down, there is no doubt which is to be chosen, no more than whether you had rather have _Vespasian's_ picture right as hee was or at the Painter's pleasure nothing resembling. But if the question be for your owne use and learning, whether it be better to have it set downe as it should be, or as it was, then certainly is more doctrinable the fayned _Cyrus of Xenophon_ than the true _Cyrus in Justine_, and the fayned _Æneas in Virgil_ than the true _Æneas_ in _Dares Phrygius._"

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But now, having drawn breath, let us follow our Poet from the lowest up to the highest of his claim. And be it observed, to start with, that in clearing and cleansing the Idea for us (in the manner described) he does but employ a process of Selection which all men are employing, all day long and every day of their lives, upon more trivial matters; a process indeed which every man is constantly obliged to employ. Life would be a night-mare for him, soon over, if he had to take account, for example, of every object flashed on the retina of his eye during a country walk. How many millions of leaves, stones, blades of grass, must he not see without seeing? Say it be the shortest of rambles on an afternoon in early November. The light fades early: but before he reaches home in the dark, how many of the myriad falling leaves has he counted?--a dozen at most. Of the myriad leaves changing colour does he preserve, unless by chance, the separate image of one? Rather from the mass over which his eyes have travelled he has abstracted an "idea" of autumnal colouring--yellow, red, brown--and with that he carries home a sentimental, perhaps even a profound, sense of the falling leaf, the falling close of the year. So--and just so, save more deftly--the Poet abstracts:--

_Where is the prime of Summer--the green prime-- The many, many leaves all twinkling?--Three On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree!_

(As a matter of fact, oak leaves are singularly tenacious, and the autumnal oak will show a thousand for the elm's one. Hood, being a Cockney, took his seven leaves at random. But what does it matter? He was a poet, and seven leaves sufficed him to convey the idea.)

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Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home some hieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is an interpreter, and the interpreter's success depends upon hitting his hearer's intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null. To put it in another way--at the base of all Literature, of all Poetry, as of all Theology, stands one rock: _the very highest Universe Truth is something so absolutely simple that a child can understand it._ This is what Emerson means when he tells us that the great writers never _seem to condescend_; that yonder slip of a boy who has carried off Shakespeare to the window-seat, can feel with King Harry or Hamlet or Coriolanus, with Rosalind or Desdemona or Miranda. For the moment he _is_ any given one of these, because any human soul contains them all. And some such thought we must believe to have been in Our Lord's mind when He said, "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." For as the Universe is one, so the individual human souls that apprehend it have no varying values intrinsically, but one equal value. They differ only in power to apprehend, and this may be more easily hindered than helped by the conceit begotten of finite knowledge. I would even dare to quote of this Universal Truth the words I once hardily put into the mouth of John Wesley concerning divine Love: "I see now that if God's love reaches up to every star and down to every poor soul on Earth, it must be something vastly simple, so simple that all dwellers on earth may be assured of it--as all who have eyes may be assured of the planet shining yonder at the end of the street--and so vast that all bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it without considering their deserts." The message, then, which one Poet brings home, is no esoteric one: as Johnson said of Gray's _Elegy_, "it abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo." It exalts us through the best in us, by telling it, not as anything new or strange, _but so as we recognise it_.

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And here let us dwell a moment on Johnson's phrase, "to which every bosom returns an echo": for it recalls us to a point, which we noted indeed on p. 22, but have left (I fear) somewhat under-emphasised--the emotion that enters into poetical truth, which only by the help of emotion is apprehended; as through emotion it is conveyed, and to an emotional understanding in the hearer addresses its appeal. For the desire of man's soul after the Universal, to be in harmony with it, is (as a matter of fact, and when all pulpit eloquence has been discounted) something more than a mere intellectual attraction: a [Greek: _storghê_] rather; a yearning felt in its veins to know its fatherhood. Saint Paul goes farther and assures us that "the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation," so that "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." "And not only they," he goes on, "but ourselves also": while the pagan poet has tears that reach the heart of the transitory show: _Sunt lacrimæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_--"Tears are for Life, mortal things pierce the soul."

And why not? For the complete man--_totus homo_--has feelings as well as reason, and should have both active, in fine training, to realise the best of him. Shelley obviously meant this when he defined Poetry as "the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." He did not mean that they are happy only in the sense of being "fortunate," _felices_, in such moments, but that they were happy in the sense of being "blessed," _beati_; and this feeling of blessedness they communicate. "We are aware," he goes on, "of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes requiring our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating _and delightful_ beyond all expression ... so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, _there cannot but be pleasure_, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a divine nature through our own, ... and the state of mind produced is at war with every base desire. The _enthusiasm_ of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is--an atom in the universe." Every word italicised above by me carries Shelley's witness that Poetry and joyous emotion are inseparable. "Poetry," he winds up, "redeems from decay the visitations of the Divinity in Man." How can we dissociate from joy the news of such visitations either on the lips that carry or in the ears that receive?