The Lyric: An Essay Part 1

The Lyric.

by John Drinkwater.

WHAT IS POETRY?

If you were to ask twenty intelligent people, "What is the Thames?" the answer due to you from each would be--"a river." And yet this would hardly be matter to satisfy your enquiring mind. You would more probably say, "What do you know of the Thames?" or, "Describe the Thames to me." This would bring you a great variety of opinions, many dissertations on geological and national history, many words in praise of beauty, many personal confessions. Here would be the revelation of many minds approaching a great subject in as many manners, confirming and contradicting each other, making on the whole some impression of c.u.mulative judgment, giving you many clues to what might be called the truth, no one of them by itself coming near to anything like full knowledge, and the final word would inevitably be left unsaid.

The question, "What is poetry?" has been answered innumerable times, often by the subtlest and clearest minds, and as many times has it been answered differently. The answer in itself now makes a large and distinguished literature to which, full as it is of keen intelligence and even of constructive vision, we can return with unstaling pleasure. The very poets themselves, it is true, lending their wits to the debate, have left the answer incomplete, as it must--not in the least unhappily--always remain.

And yet, if we consider the matter for a moment, we find that all this wisdom, prospering from Sidney's _Apology_ until to-day, does not strictly attempt to answer the question that is put. It does not tell us singly what poetry is, but it speculates upon the cause and effect of poetry. It enquires into the impulse that moves the poet to creation and describes, as far as individual limitations will allow, the way in which the poet's work impresses the world. When Wordsworth says "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," he is, exactly, in one intuitive word, telling us how poetry comes into being, directing us with an inspired gesture to its source, and not strictly telling us what it is; and so Sh.e.l.ley tells us in his fiery eloquence of the divine functions of poetry.

But poetry is, in its naked being and apart from its cause and effect, a certain use of words, and, remembering this simple fact, there has been one perfect and final answer to the question, "What is poetry?" It was Coleridge's: "Poetry--the best words in the best order."

THE BEST WORDS IN THE BEST ORDER

This is the fundamental thing to be remembered when considering the art of poetry as such. The whole question of what causes a poet to say this or that and of the impression that is thence made upon us can be definitely narrowed down to the question "How does he say it?" The manner of his utterance is, indeed, the sole evidence before us. To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential. The written word is everything. If it is an imperfect word, no external circ.u.mstance can heighten its value as poetry. We may at times, knowing of honourable and inspiriting things in a poet's life, read into his imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this our judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high aesthetic pleasure which the people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid of all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is more eager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we praise a poet's work because it chimes with unexpected precision to some particular belief or experience of our own or because it directs us by suggestion to something dear to our personal affections. Again the poet is giving us delight, but not the delight of poetry. We have to consider this alone--the poet has something to say: does he say it in the best words in the best order? By that, and by that alone, is he to be judged.

For it is to be remembered that this achievement of the best words in the best order is, perhaps, the rarest to which man can reach, implying as it does a coincidence of unfettered imaginative ecstasy with superb mental poise. The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely. He has felt it with an imaginative urgency so great as to quicken his brain to this flawless ordering of the best words, and it is that ordering and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, and gives us the supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attempt any a.n.a.lysis of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need it arbitrarily be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is a fact, sufficiently founded on experience, that the intensity of vision that demands and achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order for its expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythm of verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that the condition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what the trained judgment holds poetry to be. It implies the highest attainable intensity of vision, which, by the sanction of almost universal example, casts its best ordering of the best words into the form of verse. Ruskin wrote, with fine spiritual ardour--

"... women of England! ...do not think your daughters can be trained to the truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which G.o.d made at once for their schoolroom and their playground, lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep founts of yours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great Lawgiver strikes forth for ever from the rocks of your native land--waters which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship only with pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven--the mountains that sustain your island throne--mountains on which a Pagan would have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud--remain for you without inscription; altars built, not to, but by an unknown G.o.d."

Here we have, we may say, words in their best order--Coleridge's equally admirable definition of prose. It is splendid prose, won only from great n.o.bility of emotion. But it is not poetry, not the best words in the best order announcing that the feeling expressed has been experienced with the highest intensity possible to the mind of man. The tenderness for earth and its people and the heroic determination not to watch their defilement in silence, have been deeply significant things to Ruskin, moving him to excellent words. But could they be more strictly experienced, yet more deeply significant, shaping yet more excellent words? Blake gives us the answer:

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of G.o.d On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land.

It may be suggested that, for their purpose, Ruskin's words are perfectly chosen, that as a direct social charge they achieve their purpose better than any others that could have been shaped. Even if we allow this and do not press, as we very reasonably might, the reply that merely in this direction Blake's poem working, as is the manner of all great art, with tremendous but secret vigour upon the imagination of the people, has a deeper and more permanent effect than Ruskin's prose, we still remember that the sole purpose of poetry is to produce the virile spiritual activity that we call aesthetic delight and that to do this is the highest achievement to which the faculties of man can attain. If by "the best words" we mean anything, we must mean the best words for the highest possible purpose. To take an a.n.a.logy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government--the realisation of the will of the people. But it is also a function of government to organise the people and--although, just as we may think that Blake's poem finally beats Ruskin's prose on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that the government that best represents the people will finally best organise the people--it may quite plausibly be said that in this business an aristocratic or militant government will, in an imperfectly conditioned civilisation (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democratic government. Nevertheless, we still say with an easy mind that a democratic government is the best government, without qualification, since it excels in the highest purpose of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, and reasonably enough, an elaboration such as this in his definition--the best words in the best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those pa.s.sages, were giving expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise the distinction between prose and poetry. The closest a.n.a.lysis discovers no difference between the essential thought of the one and the other. But Blake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative shaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record and communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression would be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pa.s.s beyond that point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the terms of poetry.

One further qualification remains to be made. By words we must mean, as Coleridge must have meant, words used for a purpose which they alone can serve. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way. If you ask me the time, and I say--it is six o'clock, it may be said that I am using the best words in the best order, and that, although the thought in my mind is incapable of being refined into the higher aesthetic experience of which we have spoken, my answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in our present sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar to themselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively.

That there is no absolute standard for reference does not matter. All aesthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment, fortified by knowledge of what is, by c.u.mulative consent, the best that has been done. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so. And the conviction is, exactly, the conviction that the mood to which the matter has been subjected has been of such a kind as to achieve an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind as pa.s.sing, and it follows that there may be--as indeed there are--many poems dealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations of poetry as defined by Coleridge. For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts. If six masters paint the same landscape and under the same conditions, there will be one subject but six visions, and consequently six different interpretations, each one of which may, given the mastery, satisfy us as being perfect; perfect, that is, not as the expression of a subject which has no independent artistic existence, but as the expression of the mood in which the subject is realised. So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

THE DEGREES OF POETRY

The question that necessarily follows these reflections is--Are there degrees in poetry? Since a short lyric may completely satisfy the requirements of poetry as here set down, announcing itself to have been created in a poetic or supremely intensified mood, can poetry be said at any time to go beyond this? If we accept these conclusions, can a thing so slight, yet so exquisite, so obviously authentic in source as:

When I a verse shall make, Know I have pray'd thee, For old religion's sake, Saint Ben, to aid me.

Make the way smooth for me, When I, thy Herrick, Honouring thee, on my knee Offer my lyric.

Candles I'll give to thee, And a new altar, And thou, Saint Ben, shall be Writ in my Psalter,

be said to be less definitely poetry than _Paradise Lost_ or in any essentially poetic way below it? The logical answer is, no; and I think it is the right one. In considering it we should come to an understanding of the nature of lyric, the purpose of this essay. But first let us see how far it may be justifiable.

PARADISE LOST

It is commonly a.s.serted and accepted that _Paradise Lost_ is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. What are the qualities by virtue of which this claim is made, and allowed by every competent judge?

Firstly there is the witness of that ecstasy of mood of which we have spoken.

His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow, Breathe soft or loud: and wave your tops, ye Pines, With every plant, in sign of worship wave.

Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow, Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.

Join voices all ye living Souls. Ye Birds, That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend, Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.

Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep, Witness if I be silent, morn or even, To hill or valley, fountain, or fresh shade, Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise.

This note of high imaginative tension is persistent throughout the poem, and that it should be so masterfully sustained is in itself cause for delighted admiration. But to be constant in a virtue is not to enhance its quality. Superbly furnished as _Paradise Lost_ is with this imaginative beauty, the beauty is as rich and unquestionable in the few pages of _Lycidas_; there is less of it, that is all. And who shall say that it is less ecstatic or less perfect in the little orison to Saint Ben? You may prefer Milton's manner, but then you may, with equal reason, prefer Herrick's, being grateful for what Keats announced to be truth, in whatever shape you may find it. In any case we cannot, on this ground, a.s.sign a lower place to the poet who could order those words "religion's,"

"Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good fortune. And yet we know that _Paradise Lost_ is a greater work than this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own elegy. There is an explanation.

Of all the energies of man, that which I will antic.i.p.ate my argument by calling the poetic energy, the energy that created Herrick's song and the distinguishing qualities of that pa.s.sage from Milton, is the rarest and the most highly, if not the most generally, honoured; we have only to think of the handful of men who at any time out of all the millions can bring this perfect expression to a mood of the highest imaginative intensity, to know that the honour is justly bestowed. So splendid a thing is success in this matter that failure, if it is matched with a will for sincerity and intelligence of purpose, will often bring a man some durable fame. But the energies of man are manifold, and while we rightly set the poetic energy above the rest, there are others which are only less rare, and in their most notable manifestations yielding to it alone in worthiness of homage which will, indeed, often be more generally paid. Such an energy is the profound intellectual control of material, as distinct from profound emotional sensitiveness to material; the capacity for ordering great ma.s.ses of detail into a whole of finely balanced and duly related proportions.

Caesar and Napoleon had it, marshalling great armies to perfectly conceived designs; Fielding had it, using it to draw a mult.i.tude of character and event into the superbly shaped lines of his story; the greatest political leaders have had it; Cromwell had it, organising an enthusiasm; Elizabeth, organising a national adventure.[1] Again, there is the energy of morality, ardently desiring justice and right fellowship, sublimely lived by men who have made goodness great, like Lincoln, sublimely spoken by men who made sermons pa.s.sionate, like Ruskin and Carlyle. To take one other instance, there is the highly specialised energy that delights in the objective perception of differentiations of character, the chief energy of the deftest wits such as Samuel Johnson and the best comic dramatists.

[1: It may be necessary to point out that while the poetic energy does not include this architectural power, the intellectual co-ordination of large ma.s.ses of material, it does, of course, include the shapely control of the emotion which is its being. It is, indeed, difficult to see precisely what can be meant by the suggestion that is often made that the emotions can ever be translated into poetic form wholly without the play of intellect. If the emotion is intense enough for the creation of poetry at all, it will inevitably call up the intellectual power necessary to its shaping, otherwise it would be ineffectually diffused. Mr. John Bailey, in his masterly if sometimes provoking essay on Milton says, in the midst of some admirable remarks on this subject, "It has been said by a living writer that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose.' This is roughly true, though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff." I would suggest that poetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and could not exist. Bad verse is merely the evidence of both emotion and intellect that are, so to speak, below poetic power, not of emotion divorced from intellect, which evaporates unrecorded.]

Any one of these energies, greatly manifested, will compel a just admiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic energy, which is witness of the highest urgency of individual life, of all things the most admirable, but still great. If, further, we consider any one of these energies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent with the poetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact with so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thing arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion.

And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet more wonderful thing in Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy; Ruskin's moral fervour is, for all its n.o.bility, less memorable than Wordsworth's and Ben Jonson defines character more pungently than Sheridan. These energies remain, nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy. When, however, a poet is endowed not alone with his own particular gift of poetry, but also with some of these other energies--of which there are many--his work very rightly is allowed an added greatness. It is so with _Paradise Lost_.

Of the three energies other than the poetic that I have mentioned, Milton had rich measure of two and something of the third. No man has ever excelled him either in power of intellectual control or in moral pa.s.sion, and he was not without some sense of character. Consequently we get in his great poem, not only the dominating poetic quality which is the chief thing, enabling the poet to realise his vision (or mood) perfectly, but also the spectacle of a great number of perfectly realised visions being related to each other with excellent harmony; we get, further, a great moral exaltation--again perfectly realised by the poetic energy, and we get, finally, considerable subtlety--far more than is generally allowed--of psychological detail. From all these things, the architectonics, the zeal for justice and the revelation of character, we get an added and wholesome delight which gives Milton's work a place of definitely greater eminence than Herrick's song in the record of human activity. In effect, Milton besides being a poet, which is the greatest of all distinctions, becomes, by possession of those other qualities, a great man as well, and I think that this is really what we mean when we speak of a great poet. Without his poetic faculty, although he would fall in the scale of human distinction, which is not at all the same thing as renown, below, say, so humble a personality yet so true a poet as John Clare[2], Milton would still be a great man, while Herrick without his poetry would be indistinguishable from the crowd. And the great man is as clearly evident in Milton's poetry as he is clearly not evident in Herrick's.

[2: It may be asked: "Do you really think that a poet who has left no other record of himself than a page or two of songs, even perfect songs, can claim a greater distinction than a great man who is not a poet?" Let me say, once for all, that I do think so. To have written one perfect song is to have given witness and the only kind of witness (in common with the media of other arts) that is finally authoritative, that at least one supremely exacting mood has been perfectly realised; that is to say, one moment of life has been perfectly experienced. And since, with our human conception, we can see no good or desirable end beyond the perfect experience of life, the man who proves to us that he has done this, no matter though it has been but for a moment, is more distinguished--that is, more definitely set apart in his own achievement--than the man who, with whatever earnestness and n.o.bility, has but proved to us that he desired this perfection of experience, even though the desire is exalted by the most heroic altruism.]

WHAT IS LYRIC?

And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, the other not. It is a wide difference. Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the world's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one of something under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they are left on equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton's achievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned, and not because poetry grows better by acc.u.mulation or because it is possible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of good judges, that--

Ye have been fresh and green, Ye have been filled with flowers, And ye the walks have been Where maids have spent their hours.

You have beheld how they With wicker arks did come To kiss and bear away The richer cowslips home.

You've heard them sweetly sing, And seen them in a round: Each virgin like a spring, With honeysuckles crown'd.

But now we see none here Whose silvery feet did tread, And with dishevell'd hair Adorn'd this smoother mead.

Like unthrifts, having spent Your stock and needy grown, You've left here to lament Your poor estates, alone,