1

Again Shelley says:

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.. There is [he explains] this difference between a story and a poem [by "story' he means literal unimaginative record] 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 creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is in itself the image of all other minds.

This Platonic and Christian conception had already been expressed by Philip Sidney. He had pleaded for the superiority of poetry to history on the ground that history is tied to detached facts, which are necessarily imperfect, disjointed, transitory, unilluminating; while poetry deals with the essence of things, and makes the transient immortal by clothing them with imperishable forms. But Shelley's mind was even more like to Plato's in the extreme importance he attached to the ideal and abstract as opposed to the actual and concrete and even more ardently than Sidney does he apply Platonic idealism to his theory of poetry.

Time he says among other things] which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that [those?] of poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

It might at this point be suggested that a great deal of what Shelley and others say of poetry is true also of the higher products of prose fiction. Of the work of a great novelist as of great poetry it may be said that it is creative in its methods, essential in its portrayals, permanent in its value: and these seem to include the chief claims made for poetry. The question thus raised is an interesting one-one, however, which we can here mention but parenthetically. (2)

Shelley next asks: "What is the object or purpose of poetic creation ?" His answer (in summary form) is this:-the object or purpose is the production of pleasure-pleasure of a

2 Why Richardson's novels are not poetry is considered briefly by W. Hazlitt in the first of his Lectures on the English Poets, which may be found in the volume English Literary Criticism.

very high order; it is the ennobling of the highest faculties of man by giving them worthy and pleasurable exercise.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect namely, moral good] by acting upon the cause [the imagination]. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.

Here a touch of exaggeration may be noted. Neither imagination, nor any other single faculty or set of faculties can be rightly called "the organ of the moral nature of man." Every faculty of man's nature has its own place in the moral order of things. But undoubtedly the imagination is a high and important organ of our moral nature: and so far as it does hold such a pre-eminence may Shelley's phrase be accepted.

Having by these considerations, and with the further help of a long historical retrospect proved the majesty and utility of poetry, Shelley warms into eloquent panegyric of his art and of its masters.

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge: it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it; as the form and splendour of unfaded beauty to the secrets of amatory and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship; what were the scenery of this beautiful universe we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave; and what were our aspirations beyond it; if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? ... Poets can colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world, [their art turns all things to loveliness. It transmutes all that it touches; and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.

All things exist as they are perceived at least in relation to the

percipient. "The mind is its own place, and, of itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. . . . . It compels us to feel that which we perceive and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso: Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.($)

These are eloquent pages, and their eloquence contains much which is worth apprehending even at the cost of a little mental labour. But we have once more to recall the fact that most of what they say is true of other arts than poetry-is indeed a description of art in general. It becomes a glorification of poetry in particular just so far as we can feel or prove that poetry has prerogatives over the other arts. In his just enthusiasm for the soul of poetry as her chief glory, Shelley leaves us unenlightened as to the precise differentia of poetry from the other arts: he seems to ignore her body and garb of words and metre.

This deficiency has been abundantly made up for by theorists who have arisen since Shelley's day. Indeed, his pardonable one-sidedness has been followed by less pardonable exaggeration in the opposite direction. Shelley, like the best of the older critical writers, flew to the essence of poetry, its meaning, its appeal to the soul: he trusted the formal, still more the accidental, elements to look after themselves and find their proper place. Those who have come after him have made form and accident, words and metres, the object of their interest-too often of their idolatry. Along this path, ever since the decline of the Romantic movement, have walked various French côteries, represented by Gautier, de Banville, Mallarmé, Verlaine: kindred views have been held in England by Pater, Wilde, Symons: at present the great authority of Professor Saintsbury is to some extent committed to the support of the same exaggeration. These writers have of course differed widely in the manner as well

"The name 'creator' should be applied to none save God and the poet."

as in the degree in which they have championed the general theory of poetry which I here ascribe to them. But they have all more or less cherished and fostered the delusion that poetic form can have vital existence without poetic substance. They have conceived of poetry as built up on words, without sufficiently taking into account the nature and dignity of words, which nature and dignity lie, before all else, in their being the direct instruments and vehicles of thought. To leave this fact out of sight; to treat words as mere sounds or as symbols of other sense-objects such as colour, is to pervert and degrade them. It is thoroughly bad art. For nothing vitiates art more than to ignore the essence and prime characteristics of the material in which the artist works.

This

is true alike of stones and notes, pigments and words. In its simplest expression, none will deny the theorem. But in practice it is ignored by many; by those, among others, who have endeavoured to turn poetry from her true vocation into a foolish rival of music, and have minimized the importance of her essential and noble characteristic-her direct and definite message of thought to the human soul.

"De la musique avant toute chose." So begins Verlaine a poem in which he says some pretty and some true things about poetry. He is not speaking from the chair of Aristotle, and doubtless he did not mean to be taken quite au pied de la lettre in his opening line. But if he did (and many others have taken up the sentiment very seriously) then he is (to begin with) in flat contradiction with Shelley. He shows himself as superficial as the other was noble and profound. Who more musical than Shelley in his verse? Yet he would probably have declared, if asked-he has indeed equivalently declared that music, far from being first, is last in the philosophical consideration of poetry. It is (at best) the fine flower, not the root. He might have recalled how Horace, surely not without significance, placed it last in his enumeration of the poet's gifts:

Ingenium cui sit, cui mens divinior, atque os
Magna sonaturum, des nominis hujus honorem.
Who owns the native gift, the mind inspired,

The utterance of mighty music, he
May claim the honour of a poet's name.

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Willingly, also, would he have made his own the phrase in which Milton-surely an os magna sonaturum" as well as a "mens divinior"!-has summed up the substance and wealth of the true poet-"thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers." Such a true poet, such a vates, is not the expert versifier whose stock of ideas consists mainly of what his vigorous foraging for rhymes has brought him in; whose "mens divinior" is nothing more than ingenious jugglery with harmonious syllables. Shelley, we may be certain, would not have shared that enthusiasm of our prosodicspecialists which bursts into eloquence over sonorous emptinesses. Keenly susceptible to the sensuous charm of such a piece as Coleridge's Kubla Khan, he would nevertheless have considered utterly topsy-turvy Professor Saintsbury's judgment on that semi-nonsensical rhapsody-that "it is not easy to think of a greater piece of poetry than Kubla Khan."

LITTLE GREGORY

(From the French of Théodore Botrel.*)

The little man's mother spoke

One morning, and said:

"You are turned sixteen, and as tall
As our hutch for the bread!

A 'prentice lad in a town

Perhaps indeed you might be;

But for tilling the land, my dear,

You are much too small," quoth she.
"Too little, I say,

Marry, yea!"

The captain he hailed laughed loud

At the lad's desire.

"Nay, nay, for a new-born babe

We do not hire!

I have taken the liberty of slightly adapting vv. 3 and 4 so far as the names go.