The Function of the Poet and Other Essays Part 5

_Lepidus_ [_meditatively_]: 'T is a strange serpent.

The ideal in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades embarra.s.sing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown," whereas the imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to the mind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to this was a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, and personification with that typical expression which is the true function of poetry. Compare, for example, Collins's Revenge with Chaucer's.

Revenge impatient rose; He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down, And, with a withering look, The war-denouncing trumpet took, And blew a blast so loud and dread, Were ne'er prophetic sound so full of woe!

And ever and anon he beat The doubling drum with furious heat.

"Words, words, Horatio!" Now let us hear Chaucer with his single stealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard the murderous tread behind us:

The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.

Which is the more terrible? Which has more danger in it--Collins's noise or Chaucer's silence? Here is not the mere difference, you will perceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffuseness which distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention.

Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy as the two points most apt to impress the imagination.

The imagination, as concerns expression, condenses; the fancy, on the other hand, adorns, ill.u.s.trates, and commonly amplifies. The one is suggestive, the other picturesque. In Chapman's "Hero and Leander," I read--

Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes, And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine, For her love's sake, that with immortal wine Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's-ease Than there was water in the Sestian seas.

In the epithet "star," Hero's thought implies the beauty and brightness of her lover and his being the lord of her destiny, while in "Neptune's skies" we have not only the simple fact that the waters are the atmosphere of the sea-G.o.d's realm, but are reminded of that reflected heaven which Hero must have so often watched as it deepened below her tower in the smooth h.e.l.lespont. I call this as high an example of fancy as could well be found; it is picture and sentiment combined--the very essence of the picturesque.

But when Keats calls Mercury "the star of Lethe," the word "star" makes us see him as the poor ghosts do who are awaiting his convoy, while the word "Lethe" intensifies our sympathy by making us feel his coming as they do who are longing to drink of forgetfulness. And this again reacts upon the word "star," which, as it before expressed only the shining of the G.o.d, acquires a metaphysical significance from our habitual a.s.sociation of star with the notions of hope and promise. Again nothing can be more fanciful than this bit of Henry More the Platonist:

What doth move The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear?

The thrush or lark that, mounting high above, Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn Heavily hanging in the dewy morn?

But compare this with Keats again:

The voice I hear this pa.s.sing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown; Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

The imagination has touched that word "alien," and we see the field through Ruth's eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes, not merely through those of the poet.

CRITICAL FRAGMENTS

I. LIFE IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

It is the office and function of the imagination to renew life in lights and sounds and emotions that are outworn and familiar. It calls the soul back once more under the dead ribs of nature, and makes the meanest bush burn again, as it did to Moses, with the visible presence of G.o.d. And it works the same miracle for language. The word it has touched retains the warmth of life forever. We talk about the age of superst.i.tion and fable as if they were pa.s.sed away, as if no ghost could walk in the pure white light of science, yet the microscope that can distinguish between the disks that float in the blood of man and ox is helpless, a mere dead eyeball, before this mystery of Being, this wonder of Life, the sympathy which puts us in relation with all nature, before that mighty circulation of Deity in which stars and systems are but as the blood-disks in our own veins. And so long as wonder lasts, so long will imagination find thread for her loom, and sit like the Lady of Shalott weaving that magical web in which "the shows of things are accommodated to the desires of the mind."

It is precisely before this phenomenon of life in literature and language that criticism is forced to stop short. That it is there we know, but what it is we cannot precisely tell. It flits before us like the bird in the old story. When we think to grasp it, we already hear it singing just beyond us. It is the imagination which enables the poet to give away his own consciousness in dramatic poetry to his characters, in narrative to his language, so that they react upon us with the same original force as if they had life in themselves.

II. STYLE AND MANNER

Where Milton's style is fine it is _very_ fine, but it is always liable to the danger of degenerating into mannerism. Nay, where the imagination is absent and the artifice remains, as in some of the theological discussions in "Paradise Lost," it becomes mannerism of the most wearisome kind. Accordingly, he is easily parodied and easily imitated.

Philips, in his "Splendid Shilling," has caught the trick exactly:

Not blacker tube nor of a shorter size Smokes Cambrobriton (versed in pedigree, Sprung from Cadwallader and Arthur, kings Full famous in romantic tale) when he, O'er many a craggy hill and barren cliff, Upon a cargo of famed Cestrian cheese High overshadowing rides, with a design To vend his wares or at the Arvonian mart.

Or Maridunum, or the ancient town Yclept Brechinia, or where Vaga's stream Encircles Ariconium, fruitful soil.

Philips has caught, I say, Milton's trick; his real secret he could never divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable. But all authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily imitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence has in some respects been mischievous. Thomson was well-nigh ruined by him. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is circ.u.mlocution in the crow of a c.o.c.k. Cowper was only saved by mixing equal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus. .h.i.tting upon a kind of cross between prose and poetry. In judging Milton, however, we should not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the majesty and compa.s.s of the organ. He was as much composer as poet.

How is it with Shakespeare? did he have no style? I think I find the proof that he had it, and that of the very highest and subtlest kind, in the fact that I can nowhere put my finger on it, and say it is here or there.[1]

[Footnote 1: In his essay, "Shakespeare Once More" (_Works_, in, pp.

36-42), published in 1868, Mr. Lowell has treated of Shakespeare's style in a pa.s.sage of extraordinary felicity and depth of critical judgment.]

I do not mean that things in themselves artificial may not be highly agreeable. We learn by degrees to take a pleasure in the mannerism of Gibbon and Johnson. It is something like reading Latin as a living language. But in both these cases the man is only present by his thought. It is the force of that, and only that, which distinguishes them from their imitators, who easily possess themselves of everything else. But with Burke, who has true style, we have a very different experience. If we _go_ along with Johnson or Gibbon, we are _carried_ along by Burke. Take the finest specimen of him, for example, "The Letter to a n.o.ble Lord." The sentences throb with the very pulse of the writer. As he kindles, the phrase glows and dilates, and we feel ourselves sharing in that warmth and expansion. At last we no longer read, we seem to hear him, so livingly is the whole man in what he writes; and when the spell is over, we can scarce believe that those dull types could have held such ravishing discourse. And yet we are told that when Burke spoke in Parliament he always emptied the house.

I know very well what the charm of mere words is. I know very well that our nerves of sensation adapt themselves, as the wood of the violin is said to do, to certain modulations, so that we receive them with a readier sympathy at every repet.i.tion. This is a part of the sweet charm of the cla.s.sics. We are pleased with things in Horace which we should not find especially enlivening in Mr. Tupper. Cowper, in one of his letters, after turning a clever sentence, says, "There! if that had been written in Latin seventeen centuries ago by Mr. Flaccus, you would have thought it rather neat." How fully any particular rhythm gets possession of us we can convince ourselves by our dissatisfaction with any emendation made by a contemporary poet in his verses. Posterity may think he has improved them, but we are jarred by any change in the old tune. Even without any habitual a.s.sociation, we cannot help recognizing a certain power over our fancy in mere words. In verse almost every ear is caught with the sweetness of alliteration. I remember a line in Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" which owes much of its fascination to three _m's_, where he speaks of the Hebrid Isles

Far placed amid the melancholy main.

I remember a pa.s.sage in Prichard's "Races of Man" which had for me all the moving quality of a poem. It was something about the Arctic regions, and I could never read it without the same thrill. Dr. Prichard was certainly far from being an inspired or inspiring author, yet there was something in those words, or in their collocation, that affected me as only genius can. It was probably some dimly felt a.s.sociation, something like that strange power there is in certain odors, which, in themselves the most evanescent and impalpable of all impressions on the senses, have yet a wondrous magic in recalling, and making present to us, some forgotten experience.

Milton understood the secret of memory perfectly well, and his poems are full of those little pitfalls for the fancy. Whatever you have read, whether in the cla.s.sics, or in medieval romance, all is there to stir you with an emotion not always the less strong because indefinable. Gray makes use of the same artifice, and with the same success.

There is a charm in the arrangement of words also, and that not only in verse, but in prose. The finest prose is subject to the laws of metrical proportion. For example, in the song of Deborah and Barak: "Awake, awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, utter a song! Arise, Barak, and lead thy captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam!" Or again, "At her feet he bowed; he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead."

Setting aside, then, all charm of a.s.sociation, all the influence to which we are unconsciously subjected by melody, by harmony, or even by the mere sound of words, we may say that style is distinguished from manner by the author's power of projecting his own emotion into what he writes. The stylist is occupied with the impression which certain things have made upon him; the mannerist is wholly concerned with the impression he shall make on others.

III. KALEVALA

But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in which imagination may display itself--as an active power or as a pa.s.sive quality of the mind. The former reshapes the impressions it receives from nature to give them expression in more ideal forms; the latter reproduces them simply and freshly without any adulteration by conventional phrase, without any deliberate manipulation of them by the conscious fancy. Imagination as an active power concerns itself with expression, whether it be in giving that unity of form which we call art, or in that intenser phrase where word and thing leap together in a vivid flash of sympathy, so that we almost doubt whether the poet was conscious of his own magic, and whether we ourselves have not communicated the very charm we feel. A few such utterances have come down to us to which every generation adds some new significance out of its own store, till they do for the imagination what proverbs do for the understanding, and, pa.s.sing into the common currency of speech, become the property of every man and no man. On the other hand, wonder, which is the raw material in which imagination finds food for her loom, is the property of primitive peoples and primitive poets. There is always here a certain intimacy with nature, and a consequent simplicity of phrases and images, that please us all the more as the artificial conditions remove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happy combination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple and natural relation with the world about him, however little or however much, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his gracious and incommunicable gift. But the renewal of these conditions becomes with the advance of every generation in literary culture and social refinement more difficult. Ballads, for example, are never produced among cultivated people. Like the mayflower, they love the woods, and will not be naturalized in the garden. Now, the advantage of that primitive kind of poetry of which I was just speaking is that it finds its imaginative components ready made to its hand. But an ill.u.s.tration is worth more than any amount of discourse. Let me read you a few pa.s.sages from a poem which grew up under the true conditions of natural and primitive literature--remoteness, primitiveness of manners, and dependence on native traditions. I mean the epic of Finland--Kalevala.[1]

[Footnote 1: This translation is Mr. Lowell's, and, so far as I know, has not been printed.--C.E. NORTON.]

I am driven by my longing, Of my thought I hear the summons That to singing I betake me, That I give myself to speaking, That our race's lay I utter, Song for ages handed downward.

Words upon my lips are melting, And the eager tones escaping Will my very tongue outhasten, Will my teeth, despite me, open.

Golden friend, beloved brother, Dear one that grew up beside me, Join thee with me now in singing, Join thee with me now in speaking, Since we here have come together, Journeying by divers pathways; Seldom do we come together, One comes seldom to the other, In the barren fields far-lying, On the hard breast of the Northland.

Hand in hand together clasping, Finger fast with finger clasping, Gladly we our song will utter, Of our lays will give the choicest-- So that friends may understand it.

And the kindly ones may hear it.

In their youth which now is waxing, Climbing upward into manhood: These our words of old tradition, These our lays that we have borrowed From the belt of Wainamoinen, From the forge of Ilmarinen, From the sword of Kaukomeli, From the bow of Jonkahainen, From the borders of the ice-fields, From the plains of Kalevala.

These my father sang before me, As the axe's helve he fashioned; These were taught me by my mother, As she sat and twirled her spindle, While I on the floor was lying, At her feet, a child was rolling; Never songs of Sampo failed her.

Magic songs of Lonhi never; Sampo in her song grew aged, Lonhi with her magic vanished, In her singing died Wipunen, As I played, died Lunminkainen.

Other words there are a many, Magic words that I have taught me, Which I picked up from the pathway, Which I gathered from the forest, Which I snapped from wayside bushes, Which I gleaned from slender gra.s.s-blades, Which I found upon the foot-bridge.

When I wandered as a herd-boy.

As a child into the pastures, To the meadows rich in honey, To the sun-begoldened hilltops, Following the black Maurikki By the side of brindled Kimmo.

Lays the winter gave me also, Song was given me by the rain-storm, Other lays the wind-gusts blew me, And the waves of ocean brought them; Words I borrowed of the song-birds, And wise sayings from the tree-tops.

Then into a skein I wound them, Bound them fast into a bundle, Laid upon my ledge the burthen, Bore them with me to my dwelling, On the garret beams I stored them, In the great chest bound with copper.