Part 6

On the other hand, who has not read some of the noblest works of Shakespeare, Burns, Milton, Tennyson, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes? And who does not feel nobler for having read, and who does not hold these authors shrined in his heart of hearts for having written? Is not this proof enough that it is the mission of poetry to minister only to the higher emotions?

After all, hate is merely the negative of love; simply the absence of the better emotion, a void, an ache, a pain. All attempts to gratify it only make it stronger--or rather drive the better emotion farther away--as illustrated by the cases of Pope, Dryden, Byron, and their fellows in revenge and bitterness wherever we find them. No one ever felt better or nobler or happier for gratifying a hate, for doing a bad deed, or for giving pain to a fellow-mortal’s feelings. The ever-accusing conscience, if he but listen, will never permit him to say in his heart that such gratification has given him pleasure.

If, then, it is the mission of poetry to give pleasure, no matter whether its interpretation of the Divine in the human heart be by tears or by laughter, its ministration necessarily must be to the immortal part of man.

In the light of all this, therefore, without further argument, it is clear and conclusive that all verse that is sarcastic, satiric, etc., such as that of Swift, Butler, Pope, Gay, Prior, and their hosts, is not poetry.

But what of the didactic? Whatever has the primary object of teaching delivers its treasures to the keeping of the intellect. If, therefore, verse aims primarily to teach, but ministers to the sensibilities only incidentally, it is not true poetry. Poetry does not teach nor preach nor argue nor discuss. Those are the provinces of prose. Poems and roses must not teach; they must bloom. Their breath delights us, their suggestions, their reflections of a Divinity that is above them, lifts us--God knows why! The cry of pain, the romping laugh of children at play, the pathos of death, the touch of the hand or the lips of the one we love needs no argument to fill the heart with uncontrollable emotion. These are the sweetest of the poet’s themes, and he has but to reveal them without argument as they are experienced in the heart. Argument kills them. Just in proportion to the didactic character of verse the path of poetry is departed from, and the realm of prose invaded. You cannot find a solitary purely didactic piece of verse the meaning of which could not be better expressed in prose. Not so with true poetry. That cannot be expressed in any other way.

The most illustrious types of the didactic are to be found in the “Artificial School,” at the head of which stands Pope. When we cut out the satiric and the sarcastic and all ill-feeling verse, as we see we must, and then the didactic, as we are forced by reason and logic to do, how much real poetry do we have left in this “School” so well named “Artificial”? How much is there left that makes the heart feel larger, nobler, better, and gives it new fountains of life? Only a rare gem now and then in the form of a single felicitous line or happily wedded couplet. Then, when we cut this same kind of verse out of the whole literature of the world, and also that other kind, already spoken of at length, in which there is merely spiritless poetic form as its chief element, how much real poetry and how many real poets does the world possess? Comparatively, only a few poets, the world’s great, and a few of their works--those that have already stood the test of time and that still stand the only true test of good literature, that it inspires the heart with noble feelings and lofty purposes--can be placed in the list.

But enough on the kinds of verse.

Another question concerning pleasure arising from poetry presents itself. “Violent delights have violent ends and in their triumph die.” The poetic, by its very nature, is violent. Consequently, the mind cannot long imbibe its intoxicating draughts. A little at a time is exhilarating and invigorating; but an over-dose deadens the sensibilities, and often creates a serious dislike for the poetic and a consequent unconscious restlessness of longing for the satisfaction of the higher emotions that prose can never furnish.

The mind cannot long endure extreme exertion, just as the body cannot. Poetry requires extreme exertion of the sensibilities, consequently its duration should be short that its full delight and pleasure may be enjoyed. Since this is so, every poem, by the very nature of the mind, must be brief. Who would live in a conservatory of roses where their sweet scent, most delightful at first breath, soon becomes sickening? Or who would hold even one of those odorous blooms to the nose for long? Who, on the other hand, does not delight in an occasional sip of the scent of a bursting rose-bud? And who does not find new delight at each successive draught, and regret that the petals that breathe this odor for us, alas! must fade and fall?

I believe most profoundly with Poe that, from the standpoint of the mind that produces and the mind that perceives and enjoys it, there is no such thing as a long poem. I shall go farther, and say, not only that a poem must be short, but that it must be lyrical. This gets us back to nature. Historically the first literature of every nation is poetry, and that poetry is invariably lyrical; indeed, even inevitably so. In every nation, we find it is many centuries before these lyrics of the nation are gathered up and finally strung on the thread of narrative, thus making the Epic. From the lyric, all imaginable forms have been brought forth by ingenious poets of later day. The bard of simple days lived, not close to nature’s intellect, but close to nature’s heart. Burns was the best poet of modern days, because he did the same; consequently, he is always lyrical when he is natural.

Shall we then say that the Æneid, the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Canterbury Tales, the Faery Queen, or Paradise Lost is each one poem? Viewed as I have just remarked, and that (in its relation to the mind) is the only true way to view a poem, none of these is a single poem. Each is made up of a number of poems--gems strung on the thread of a common subject;--roses in a common conservatory.

Indeed, the whole of Homer is simply a collection of a great number of short poems--lyrics, indeed, they were--sung by many authors for centuries, and finally gathered up and pieced together to form books and volumes. Each one of the Canterbury Tales contains many poems, strung together to form one necklace of jewels.

I ask any one to sit down and read any of these great and wonderful works continuously one day, as he might prose, and comprehend what he is reading. Not even one book of Paradise Lost can be _read_ (in the true sense of that word) at a single sitting. There are too many poems in it, and the consequent demands upon the mind are too great for that. Possibly this very fact had somewhat to do with calling forth the unjust remark from Waller concerning that great epic, “If its length be not considered as a merit it hath no other.”

Since a poem must be brief, naturally, and for the same cause, it should be read judiciously and at intervals, if it is to be appreciated and enjoyed, just as the rose must be smelled only occasionally. We cannot read poetry as we can prose; it won’t let us. By their very natures they demand a different manner of reading. One can read prose continuously, hour after hour, without seriously wearying the mind, for the simple reason that, in prose, thought is not condensed, but is spread through a long series of sentences. Moreover, the thought is not, as a rule, simply suggested, but is fully expressed, leaving the mind in a comparative state of passive receptivity, with but little active labor to perform in order to comprehend the meaning. On the other hand, poetry always expresses thought in condensed form and suggests many fold more than it expresses. Consequently, a single stanza or even a single line may sometimes require as much attention for the full comprehension of its meaning and suggestion, as a whole page of ordinary prose.

We must plant the poem in the heart and give it time to grow, as we plant the flower-seeds in the soil. Finally, as the growing flower bursts into bloom, so must the poem blossom from the heart into its full perfection and beauty.

Fully to appreciate that flower’s beauty, it must not be dissected and analyzed by glass and scalpel. Did Burns go botanizing the daisy? Need we then go botanizing these flowers and blossoms of the soul of man? He who does it tries to force the intellect to do what the emotive nature, the beauty-loving part of man, alone can do. There is an intellectual delight in botanizing and in picking to pieces and analyzing the gathered specimens, but it is not that sweet, soul-inspiring pleasure born of the love of the beautiful that the heart alone can feel. He who botanizes the beautiful can never know in his head the supreme pleasure that he who loves the simple daisy too well to turn it under the sod feels in his heart.

Poetry is indeed immortal and divine. It is the breath of heaven in the nostrils of man, the divinity of the human soul, the heart in full flower and bloom. To an honest, earnest, sincere soul, it is the wonder of the age, as it has ever been the wonder of all ages, that “men endowed with highest gifts, the vision and the faculty divine,” being divinely appointed as poet-priest of the Almighty, should pander to the prurient taste of a so-called practical public;--that they should sell the divinity within them for a strip of royal purple; for a salve to an itching palm;--that they should barter immortality for a glitter-jingle.

But how shall this consummate artist not fall into the corruptions that beset him and his art divine? Here are the driveling jinglers, verse-makers, poetasters all about him, with their rattling, rollicking, banging tin-panery, loudly applauded by a rough-and-ready guffawing public; a “practical” public that loudly clamors for _sense_, _fact_,--and then drops another penny into the chapeaux of these venders of cheap jewelry for more of their applauded cheap sentiment and glittering platitudes, and jingling chains and necklaces, and rings, and things, whose brightness wears off in their mental pockets before the wife or sweetheart is gladdened by a glimpse of its “practical” glitter!

The great, true poet, he who alone is interpreter of the immortal in the mortal, the invisible in the visible by means of words, never asks how to avoid these corruptions. He does it. He despises, hates, abhors them. He does it, too, by obeying that Divinity within him. Obedient to that call, he walks majestically through this motley crowd;--aye, through this sometimes maudlin, jeering crowd that throw stones at him and mentally would crucify him!--and sets some stream of Beauty and Glory flowing through the hearts of men, forever to wash away these corruptions and stagnations of the human soul. Aye, truly! he asks not how, but teaches us how. Was it not so with those old Divine Writers, our highest type of poets, whose inspirations make the one Immortal Book? So shall it ever be. ’Tis the Divine Law.

Such a poet, interpreting nature and mirroring Divinity, and thus idealizing life that the seeing, aspiring soul may attain nearer its illimitable possibilities, we call an original poet, a genius. He is never a “popular” poet, as that term is used, but he is quite generally unpopular. Popular in the sense of time-enduring he is by that same Divine Law that brings him into existence. His soul will inevitably have some greatness in common with other great souls. These will rescue him and commend him to an increasing posterity; and so on and on, touching more and more souls, and thus seeming to grow ever better and better, though in reality he remains ever unchanged, while the souls he touches are the ones that ever strive to his greater height, and draw up numbers with them.

Thus does he whom an unappreciating, small-souled mob would have crucified, become immortal through the reciprocal divinity that is in himself and in the heart of humanity. Thus does, thus must, this poet-genius create--call into activity--the taste that must make him time-enduring. This is the penalty of genius and greatness--to suffer, and then triumphantly to endure forever in the hearts of men. Who would he were not a genius? Who would he were? In proof of all this, witness Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, not to speak of all the greatest Great.

I love that unswerving poetic genius who, in the face of taunts and revilings and sneers, still is obedient to that sublime divinity within him; who, conscious of his own soul’s illimitable vastness, must inevitably write for that soul’s satisfaction, and thus write, not for the present generation, but for posterity; and who, when he “wraps the drapery of his couch about him,” having obeyed the divine voice within him even to his latest breath, finally triumphs over all sneers and taunts and jeers, triumphs even over death, and, though dead, triumphantly lives in immortal words that still speak to us more and more divinely through the trumpet-soul of the more and more divine ages.

Such a poet, I say, must create the taste that will make him time-enduring. In other words, this true poet, this genius (else he were no genius at all), must see some relation of soul to soul not ordinarily seen, and never at all seen in exactly the same way, and so express that relation in words that humanity can but recognize it from the very fact of its commonness, its universality. Such a poet never follows public opinion, in the narrow sense of the opinion of a transitory present; but through great trials and suffering and much enduring generally, he leads it, or creates it rather, and develops it into that broader, truer public opinion,--humanity’s opinion; the only opinion, I should say, that is equal to that of a great soul.

The great never follow, but ever lead. They never pander to a perverted public taste, but follow their own convictions; and thus following the guiding power within them, they lead others in the same path. Thus drawn onwards and upwards by that link which binds man unto God, and thus leading humanity aright, they instinctively obey the teachings of Him, the Master, who “came not to be ministered unto, but to minister”; for they follow in His footsteps by upward leading and by thus greatly and divinely serving mankind.

In a general way, I may say of poets that there are two classes:--the introspective, or those whose souls, ever standing in the presence of the Divinity within them, hear the calls of other souls and the mighty voice of God; and hearing, obey;--the extrospective, or those whose souls, not less divine, but less conscious, perhaps, of that Divinity, unconsciously perceive the manifold relations in external nature, and through the universal spirit of nature none the less distinctly hear that same Almighty Voice. We shall hardly find a poet in whom one of these characteristics exists to the exclusion of the other; but we shall find that in many cases one characteristic or the other is dominant. For example, Browning is one of our best representatives of the introspective, and Wordsworth of the extrospective; while Shakespeare is the highest type of the perfect union of the two. Both classes obey the same voice, and though ministering through different sources, have the same mission to perform, the uplifting and purifying of the human soul.

Indeed, whatever does not have this mission is not true poetry. It is often said that that literature is best which has stood the test of time. Not so, if by that is meant simply that the literature shall have lived long; for both good and bad live. The true test is that it betters man’s estate, and ennobles his heart. If a poem inspires the heart with nobler feelings and greater love, then it is a good poem. This is the crucial, the only true test.

There is no act of the human mind that is not controlled by the feelings. When this is comprehended and when, at the same time, it is perceived to what an extent poetry ministers to the feelings, the utility of poetry will be better appreciated. Poetry thus ministering to the controlling forces of life, is a guide and corrective of life; a guide in that it is “a representation of life” (as Alfred Austin has it), the experiences of the hearts of men; a corrective in that it is “a criticism of life” (as Matthew Arnold says), an idealization that, by uplifting, corrects the heart that else would droop. Austin thinks his idea opposes Arnold’s. It does not. Each simply looks at one side; each takes a different angle. Both are correct so far as they go. For poetry is the heart’s history. It is also the ever present attempt, in the light of that guiding lamp, to the making of a better history.

This, indeed, makes it philosophy. For what else does philosophy do? The poet is ever a philosopher. Is not poetry philosophy teaching by experience? It does not teach by precept, it is not didactic; that is the province of prose; but it mirrors the human heart and reveals its experiences. Nine hundred ninety-nine people shape their lives by experience where one shapes his by rule and thumb. One rose of experience with its warning thorns has more of humanity and guidance in it than all the tangle-woods of teaching. The hand must follow the heart. If the heart be right the hand can never go wrong.

He who would be an immortal poet must have a great and sympathizing heart; a heart that laughs and weeps, and most of all, a heart that loves. Were I asked the one essential of the poet, that essential which includes all minor requisites, I should answer, Love. “A Poet without Love,” says Carlyle, “were a physical and a metaphysical impossibility.” It is the dominating element of all great poets. What poet is greater, or what one has loved more deeply than Burns?

Love often reveals itself in sorrow and in humor. Though the poet need not be a humorist, must not be at all times, as the term is used, it is nevertheless essential that he have a lively appreciation of the ludicrous, lest he fall into grave errors of thought and expression. But the humor must not be the all-pervading element of his poetry; it should be simply a check, a guide, or sometimes a spur. A keen sense of humor should be to him the lash that whips thought out of its self-constituted morbid glooms, in which it appears ridiculous, into a lively harmony with things as they really are to the hearts of men. It were, indeed, a nice question to determine how far the grave or the humorous should enter poetic composition to the exclusion of the other. Certainly the most felicitous poetry is not all rain nor all shine, but the iris of Ulloa struck out of the depths of tears by the happy, hopeful shine of laughter.

But if the poet laugh, he must also love; for he laughs because he loves. This is the divine law. The man who hates never laughs; he may mock. Well may we ponder that. Indeed, tears and laughter, sometimes blended, are but forms of love. If laughter is music, certainly love, that divine gift in the human heart, love of the good, the beautiful, and the true, love of home, of country, of mankind, of God, or of a beautiful image of God, the one who is the heart’s ideal, divine immortal love, is perfect harmony. If the poet’s theme is of the good, the beautiful, and the true, so must his love be. If these dwell not in his heart, he shall search the world and the ages through and not find them; and if love dwell not there with them, his themes shall never touch our hearts.

But the poet, to be appreciated, is not the only one that must possess these qualities. It is the beauty and the love in the soul of him who is touched by the statue, the painting, the melody, the poem, that makes it beautiful to him. It is thus that we help the poet make the poem. Love makes poets of us all.

With our hearts thus tuned to the touch of the Maker’s hand, we may often hold sweet communion with our poet-friends whose love still reaches out to us through the mists of ages and beckons us to the Valhalla of the happy. We may stand alone in the stern, inquisitorial presence of self under the eye of Almighty God, and think thoughts our tongues can never tell.

Strolling arm in arm with good Dan Chaucer as

“... fiery Phœbus riseth up so bright That all the orient laugheth of the light,”

we may meet and join company with immortal Shakespeare, where

“... the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o’er the dew of yond high eastern hill”;

and then with them both we may pass down the slope to the sea-shore where we clasp hands with Laureate Tennyson and, as we listen to the _break, break, break_ upon the sands, say in our hearts with him,

“And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.”

With Milton we may plunge to the lowest depths and rise to the greatest heights, and stand with him at last in a Paradise regained. With Dryden we may shout from the golden-tipped top of the mount of lyric song to the battling brave below,

“If the world be worth thy winning, Think, oh think it worth enjoying”;

and hear the reverberant echoes along the channeled valleys of the soul of Gray,

“The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

With Whittier, longing to do and doing the greatest good of which we are capable, we may often question,

“What, my soul, was thy errand here?”

Listening to the Preacher Kingsley, we may learn to

“Do lovely things, not dream them, all day long; And so, make life and death and that vast forever One grand, sweet song.”

In our sadder moods we may, with Cowper, look across the dark, Cimmerian tide and recall the face and the kiss and the touch of a mother gone. In our gayer hours, with Burns we may gather sweet field flowers and garland them in love; and, whether in field or shop or kirk, learn somewhat

“To see oursels as others see us.”

With Wordsworth, receiving those faint intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood, we may realize

“That there has passed away a glory from the earth.”

With Lowell we may feel that

“Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.”

If in the pursuit of life we shall have been drawn onwards by that divine link called conscience; if we shall have heeded the advice to the Divinity within us,

“... To thine own self be true; And it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man”;

if within us daily we shall have said with dear old Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,

“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea”;

if we shall have done all this, I say, and followed God: then, when at last with white-haired Bryant each of us

“lies down to pleasant dreams,”

the Sun shall go down with a golden halo of glory; Beauty, eternal Beauty, wedded to immortal Love, shall reign forever in the heart;

“And the night shall be filled with music; And the cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.”

USELESS?

Flowers are poetry; poetry, flowers: Each is a clod of earth in bloom. Useful? Aye, to the heart!--to illume The rain-drop drip from the wing of the hours.

Both are the love of the great dear God Set in the sod of the new child-earth, Set in the heart at the earth-child’s birth, Soul of the clay, and bloom of the clod.