99 PART FIRST. POETRY AND THE DRAMA. THE NATURE AND OBJECT OF POETRY.* We are not aware that any successful attempt has been made to explain the nature of Poetry, or to show by what general characteristics it is distinguished from prose. Most of the discussions upon this pleasant art have been introduced with reference to the merits of particular pieces, and avoid the general question altogether. Some are occupied in analyzing the structure of the story; some in canvassing the probability of the incidents, the truth of the characters, the purity of the diction, or the correction of the metaphors; leaving the grand distinction between poetry and prose, as well as the component qualities of poetry itself, to the speculation of the reader. With the few who have taken a wider range, it has been usual to consider poetry merely as one of the fine arts, and to compare it accordingly with painting and music and sculpture and as this forms, no doubt, a branch of the discussion on which we are about to enter, we may as well begin by saying a few words on this comparative view of it. In so far, then, as Poetry may be considered as one of the fine arts, we apprehend that it is undoubtedly the first of them; because it combines nearly all the excellences of the other arts, with much that is peculiar to itself. It has the vivid beauty of painting, the prominence and simplicity of sculpture, and the touching cadences of music, while it outlasts them all. For time, which presses on most things with so wasteful a force, seems to have no effect on the masterpieces of Poetry, but to render them holy. The "Venus" of Apelles, and the "grapes" of Zeuxis have vanished, and the music of Timotheus is gone; but the bowers of Circe still remain unfaded, and the "chained Prometheus" has outlived the "Cupid" of Praxiteles and the "brazen bull" of Perillus. Poetry may not perhaps attain its end so perfectly as painting or sculplure; but that is because its end is so high, and its range so much extended. It deals with more varied and more remote objects,with abstract ideas and questions of intellect which are beyond the reach of the other arts. It may be considered as a moral science, operating both upon the passions and the reason, although it never, strictly speaking, addresses itself directly to the latter. It operates through the medium of words, which, however inferior, in certain cases, to colours or sounds, are far more generally available, and, in fact, perform what neither sounds nor colours can accomplish. It may indeed be truly said, that the highest object of painting and sculpture has been to translate into another language, and for the benefit of Specimens of the Earlier English Poets-S. W. Simpson. The Commonplace Book of British Poetry. Vol. xlii. p. 31. April, 1825. a different sense, what the imagination of the poet has already created. Almost all the treasures of Italy and Greece are copies, made by the chisel or the pencil, from elevated fable (which is poetry), or from Greek or Hebrew verse. That they have their own peculiar hues and symmetry, does not disturb this opinion; for the original idea existed entire before, and that sprang from the imagination of the poet. Painting, in fact, as well as sculpture, is essentially a mimetic art: but poetry is not essentially, though it may be casually, imitative; and when it is so, it is imitative in a different manner, and in a less degree. As a mimetic art, it is, in one sense, inferior to the others; but it is not limited, like them, to a moment of time; and it can display the characters, the manners, and, above all, the sentiments of mankind, in a way to which the others have no pretensions. The very nature of the medium through which it acts prevents it from being so strictly mimetic as sculpture and painting: for language cannot, in any way, copy directly from nature, unless it be in imitation of sound; and music, although said to imitate motion, in reality does little more than imitate the sounds which accompany motion. In comparison with Music, however, Poetry has a vast and acknowledged superiority, both as to the distinctness and variety of the impressions it conveys. The pleasure of music, in so far as it is not merely organic, and in some sort sensual, seems to consist merely in the suggestion of general moods or tones of feeling, without any definite image, or intelligible result; and, though it may sometimes prompt or excite the mind to poetical conceptions, it can scarcely of itself attain any intellectual or passionate character, except by being "married to immortal verse," and thus reduced to an accompaniment or exponent of that nobler and more creative art. In regard to the difficult question, as to what poetry is, it may be as well to begin by negatives and to separate what may occasionally or accidentally aid its effect, from what is truly essential to its existence. Poetry, then, is not necessarily eloquence, fiction, morality, description, philosophy, wit-nor even passion; although passion approaches nearest to it, when it spreads that haze before our eyes, which changes and magnifies objects from their actual and prosaic size. Passion, in truth, often stimulates the imagination, and the imagination begets poetry; but it operates also upon other parts of the mind, and the result is simply pathos, indignation, eloquence, or tears. Philosophy, again, is founded in reason, and is built up of facts and experiments, collected and massed regularly together. It is constituted entirely of realities, and is itself a thing no more to be questioned than an object that stands close before us, visible and tangible it is always to be proved. But poetry proceeds upon a principle utterly different; and, in the strict sense, never exists but in the brain of the writer, until it be cast forth in the shape of verse. Neither is Fiction always poetical; for it deals often in the most simple conceptions, and pervades burlesque and farce, where human nature is degraded, as well as poetry, where it is elevated. Again, a Maxim is never, per se, poetical, nor a satire, nor an epigram, although all may be found amongst the writings of our poets. Descriptions of nature are commonly assumed to be poetry, but we think erroneously; for a mere transcript of nature is, of necessity, prosaic. It is true, that the materials out of which poetry is compounded, lie, perhaps, principally in nature; but not poetry itself. Eloquence or rhetoric is nothing more than an exaggeration of prose. Words may be strong, glowing, stimulating, and yet, even though rythmically assorted, possess no imagination or fancy. In oratory, indeed, it may be that poetical figures are mixed up with, and lend a grace to speech; but the staple of the orator's pleadings must be prose, which he uses (or abuses) to convince the understandings of his hearers-or, at all events, to persuade them, by direct and substantial motives, to some actual and practical end. Demosthenes and Cicero were eloquent; but who will assert that they were poetical? They were rhetorical, vehement, ingenious: they reasoned, and thereby persuaded but they would not have been persuasive, had they made use of poetry, which is complicated, instead of prose, which is single and obvious, for the purpose of convincing their hearers. If none of these intellectual qualities be essential to Poetry, we need scarcely say that it is not simply verse; although that may be useful, and perhaps even necessary to its existence. Verse is the limit, or shape by which poetry is bounded it is the adjunct of poetry, but not its living principle. Neither is poetry music; so that, to try it by the laws, either of metre or of tone, must necessarily be fallacious. It is well enough, as a matter of amusement, to ascertain how the lines of our great poets have been fashioned; but to deduce authoritative rules from poems that have been written without rule, is plainly to derive an argument in favour of bondage, from the most splendid proofs of the benefits of freedom. Shakspeare most assuredly wrote without any reference to rule: he trusted to his ear, and produced the finest dramatic verse in the world. Milton also, beyond competition the greatest writer of epic verse of whom we can boast, learned as he was both in metres and music, and with the finest apprehension for harmony, evidently composed without rule, and trusted to his ear alone for those exquisite cadences with which, from his Lycidas to his Paradise Regained, all his poems abound. It is undeniable, indeed, that the verse which is most perfectly according to rule is uniformly the most disagreeable. We are speedily tired of lines where the meaning invariably ends with the tenth syllable: and if we admit this, and allow the poet to terminate his periods in the middle, or in any other part of the line, where is his privilege to cease? Verse, in its own nature, implies nothing but regularity, and any kind or degree of regularity that is found to be agreeable must be just as legitimate as any other. It might be rash, perhaps, to depart altogether from familiar models; but to insist that certain lines, with certain accents, should alone be held up as models, because they produce a good effect among others of a different modulation, is preposterous. Is it to be supposed that Milton did not know what he was about when he threw in that strange line— "And Tiresias and Plineus, prophets old" or Shakspeare, when he addresses Earth, "our common mother," "Whose womb unmeasurable and infinite breast And yet we think the critics would be perplexed, were they to attempt to subdue these lines to their canons of quantity. What would the painters say, if an amateur should stand forward and insist on their piling all their figures in a precise triangle? Yet we know that the pyramidal shape is the beau ideal of an artist. Variety, in short, is necessary in poetry as in other things. It is the whole that should be harmonious; and it is not true that this large and effective harmony is to be attained by the absolute and exact uniformity of all the corresponding parts. The poets know this: and it will be well for us to leave them to the free practice of their art, instead of perplexing them with dogmas, which we are sure that the better part of them will never consent to follow. But to come a little nearer an affirmative. Its Poetry is a creation. It is a thing created by the mind, and not merely copied either from nature, or facts in any shape. Next to this general but most correct and significant definition, if it can be so called, perhaps the best explanation is that given by Lord Bacon, where he says, that "poetry doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind;" though here, as in all the rest of the discussion, we should ever bear in mind, that poetry, after all, is the effect, and not the cause. It does not properly "alter the shows of things," but transcribes from the imagination the new form that results from the alteration. after effect upon the reader is produced by this transcript, and he sees merely the new poetic creation, and receives its effects. Poetry, then, is to be understood as a thing" different from prose," which is its antithesis; that is to say, it is always something different from the literal prosaic fact, such as we contemplate it with the eye of sense or reason. However it may be true in itself (and it ought to be true), as a compound image or signification of consistent ideas, it must not be in all respects literally true. The materials of poetry, as we have said, are to be found in nature or art, but not poetry itself; for, if poetry were strewn before us like flowers, or if it irradiated the heavens like sunshine or the stars, we should have nothing to do but to copy it as exactly as we could; and it would then be a "mimetic"* art only, and not " a creation." Prose, according to our conception of it, is in substance the presentment of single and separate ideas, arranged for purposes of reasoning, instruction, or persuasion. It is the organ or vehicle of reason, and deals accordingly in realities, and spreads itself out in analysis and deduction-combining and disposing words, as figures are used by arithmeticians, to explain, or prove, or to produce some particular effect from established premises. It acts upon foregone conclusions, or tends by regular gradations to a manifest object; and in proportion as it fails in these, it is clouded or imperfect. Poetry, on the other hand, is essentially complicated. It is produced by various powers common to most persons, but more especially by those which are almost peculiar to the poet, viz. Fancy, and the crowning spirit-Imagination! This last is the first moving or creative principle of the mind, which fashions, out of materials previously existing, new conceptions and original truths, not absolutely justifiable by the ordinary rules of logic, but quite intelligible to the mind when duly elevated-intelligible through our sympathies, our sensibility, like light or the balmy air, although not sufficiently definite or settled into form to stand the cold calculating survey of our reason. It is not so much, however, that imagination sees things differently from reason, as that it uses them differently; the one dealing with single ideas, and observing, if we may so speak, the naked reality of things; the other We do not forget Aristotle's "Miunoix:"-but etymology and general opinion are clearly against the great Stagyrite. Neither he nor Lord Bacon were, in the usual acceptation of the term, poets; and were therefore, perhaps, with all their great powers, less qualified to judge of certain processes of the mind, than inferior men who experienced them. combining and reproducing them as they never appear in nature. Nevertheless, poetry, though creative in its principle, comprehends not so much what is impossible, as what is at present unknown; and hence, perhaps, may be urged the claim of its followers to the title of "Vates." It is the harmony of the mind, in short, which embraces and reconciles its seeming discords. It looks not only at the husk and outward show of things, but contemplates them in their principles, and through their secret relations. It is brief and suggestive, rather than explicit and argumentative. Its words are like the breath of an oracle, which it is the business of prose to expound. Imagination differs from fancy, inasmuch as it does by a single glance what the latter effects by deliberate comparison. Generally speaking, imagination deals with the passions and the higher moods of the mind. It is the fiercer and more potent spirit; and the images are flung out of its burning grasp, as it were, molten, * and massed together. It is a complex power, including those faculties which are called by metaphysicians— Conception, Abstraction, and Judgment. It is the genius of personification. It concentrates the many into the one, colouring and investing its own complex creation with the attributes of all. It multiplies and divides and remodels, always changing in one respect or other the literal fact, and always enriching it, when properly exerted. It merges ordinary nature and literal truth in the atmosphere which it exhales, till they come forth like the illuminations of sunset, which were nothing but clouds before. It acts upon all things drawn within its range; sometimes in the creation of character (as in Satan and Ariel, etc.), and sometimes in figures of speech and common expression. It is different in different people; in Shakspeare, bright and rapid as the lightning, fusing things by its power; in Milton, awful as collected thunder. It peoples the elements with fantastic forms, and fills the earth with unearthly heroism, intellect, and beauty. It is the parent of all those passionate creations which Shakspeare has bequeathed to us. It is the origin of that terrible generation of Milton,— Sin, and the shadowy Death, Rumour, and Discord with its thousand tongues, Night and Chaos," ancestors of Nature,"down to all those who lie "Under the boiling ocean, wrapt in chains” — of all phantasies born beneath the moon, and all the miracles of dreams. It is an intense and burning power, and comes "Wing'd with red lightning and impetuous rage" (which line is itself a magnificent instance of imagination)—and is indeed a concentration of the intellect, gathering together its wandering faculties, and bursting forth in a flood of thought, till the apprehension is staggered which pursues it. The exertion of this faculty is apparent in every page of our two great poets; from "The shout that tore hell's concave," to the "care" that "sate on the faded cheek" of Satan; from the "wounds of Thammuz" which “· allured” 66 "The brain," as Hobbes says, or spirit therein, having been stirred by divers objects composeth an imagination of divers conceptions, that appeared single to the sense. As, for example, the sense showeth at one time the figure of a mountain, and at another time the colour of gold; but the imagination afterwards hath them both at once in a "golden mountain."-Essay on Human Nature, ch. 3. |