Part 16 (2/2)

These men were all poets; that is, they gave us poems here and there in their work. Meredith might have added d.i.c.kens's and his own work among comic works that contain poetry. The writers of comedy deal with feelings and emotions; most of them were men of intellect and deep feeling.

In a pa.s.sage that is itself a poem, Meredith describes the Comic spirit, which he recognized as allied to poetry. And this in part is his delineation of it:

It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of the faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and wherever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually or in the bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.

Closely akin to the comic genius is that of satire. Again satire is not poetry, except when presenting ideas and evoking ecstasy. There used to be a distinct form of verse poetry called the satire, but there is often more or less satire in the works of novelists, prose dramatists and essayists. We have as remnants of great ancient satire, poems by Horace and Juvenal, tales by Apuleius and Petronius and the prose dialogues of Lucian.

The great masters of satire in modern times have done their work in prose and much of this is poetry. We think of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, Anatole France and Samuel Butler. There is plenty of poetry in the _Penguin Island_ and _Erewhon_, for example. Modern satire is p.r.o.ne to be more poetical than the ancient verse satire, being free from coa.r.s.eness and insult, and abounding in ideas. Satire is not mere ranting and cursing, but a keen and amusing way of showing forth human follies. You find it in writers as different as Thackeray and Bernard Shaw. Some of the satire in Sinclair Lewis's novel _Main Street_ is excellent poetry.

The highest form of satire in all the prose writers is poetry, as much so as if put in the heroic couplets of Pope or the ottava rima of Byron's _Vision of Last Judgment_.

Satire is poetry when it is universal. Much of the old Arabic poetry was satire and yet genuine poetry. Pope's satires are poetry. Lafcadio Hearn has said a few words on the subject that deserve quoting:

It is not because the satires (of Pope) were true pictures or caricatures of any living person in particular, but because they were true pictures of general types of human weakness which have always existed, which exist to-day and which will exist to-morrow. (_Life and Literature_, p. 286.)

My theory of poetry as ecstasy also seeks to do away with the tendency of criticism to identify poetry with the figure of speech or trope. Even when it has lacked the quality which fills the reader with ecstasy, the trope has been called poetry just because it was a trope. Imagery has been confused with imagination, and many critics regard that as poetry which makes the most frequent use of unusual figures of speech. As a result, some of the figures of speech in poetry to-day are more artificial even than those found in Oriental poetry. But no one can take issue with the beautiful figures such as appear in the _Bible_ and in Dante, in Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, of which the essence is a beautiful flight of the imagination that fills us with ecstasy. But when freakish tropes take the place of poetry then we ought to rebel. We like the figure of speech introduced occasionally and naturally, and we don't want the figure subst.i.tuted for ideas and emotions.

One critic even, Hudson Maxim, has written a book on _The Science of Poetry_, to identify poetry with the figure of speech. In spite of its eccentricities, and its attempt at creation of new terms like tro-tempotentry, the author recognizes that the critics confuse poetry with metre, and that a prose writer like Robert Ingersoll was a poet.

Any one who had read Ingersoll's prose poems, and some of his orations like the one on _Liberty in Literature_, will recognize this. The mistake that Maxim makes is to call poetry defiantly a science, and then to define it as an art in which figures of speech count most. To create figures of speech is an art. Maxim's definition of poetry is ”The expression of insensuous thought in sensuous terms by artistic trope.”

This definition covers much of ancient poetry, when man constantly used tropes or figures of speech. It is also true that a vast body of the world's poetry is full of tropes like metaphors and similes. In fact even our free verse is full of them. But the figure of speech is only one of the features that are often present in poetry, and we may and do have the best poetry without it. Its frequent use has become a nuisance; it often atones for lack of ideas, it is often a sign of insincerity in the poet, and it occasionally bespeaks a raving imagination. The day of tropes in poetry is, in spite of the Imagists, on the decline. You find none of them in prose plays and very few in prose fiction. The trope was an early adornment of poetry as rhythm was. It is not the essence of poetry, though it often beautifies poetry.

The critics do not accept the book of Maxim's as a true statement of the aims of poetry, but curiously enough they have always followed the views in his book. They have confused tropes, or figures of speech, or imagery with imagination. In the past the older critics fell into this error and when they spoke of imagination they were really expatiating on imagery.

One of the best English critics on poetry, Leigh Hunt, sinned in this direction. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge he made much of the distinction between imagination and fancy. Wordsworth arranged his poems in an edition of his works according to this distinction. Leigh Hunt got up an anthology called _Imagination and Fancy_, in which he italicized the imaginative and the fanciful pa.s.sages, and to which he prefixed his famous essay on ”What is Poetry?” Here he gave his definitions of and distinctions between imagination and fancy. Half the essay is devoted really to identifying them with figures of speech. The only difference between the two faculties was that fancy was a lighter play of the imagination, a distinction really utterly trivial. His work was needed at a time when the influence of Pope still ruled, and people could not appreciate the rich figures in Sh.e.l.ley and Keats. Pater called attention to the real distinction between imagination and fancy which is ”between higher and lower degrees of intensity in the poet's perception of his work, and in his concentration of himself upon his work.” For all purposes, however, fancy may be included under imagination. Imagery is not always imaginative, for many figures of speech have no ecstatic quality.

The English poets who were regarded as most gifted with the faculty of imagination under the old definition were Milton and Spenser, chiefly for their bold use of supernatural imagery. Homer and Dante were always noted for their beautiful and effective similes, and they were also the poets of the imagination _par excellence_. The confusion of imagery with imagination resulted in giving figures of speech a significance in determining the nature of poetry that it did not merit. Puttenham's book in the Elizabethan Age, _The Arte of English Poesie_, was half employed with ornament or various figures. Oriental poetry was especially figurative; all Oriental books on rhetoric deal extensively with figures of speech. In short it was taken for granted by all critics that poetry was imagery or figures of speech, because poetry was a product of the imagination, and imagination was confused with imagery. It is true that it is the function of the imagination to compare, but that does not mean that it is nothing more than metaphor or simile. The tropes were more natural to early man who personified inanimate things and always saw resemblances to draw from in nature. To-day the novelist or dramatist introduces his metaphor or simile occasionally or naturally, as an ornamental touch to convey his meaning better. Many modern versifiers identify poetry with ornament and figures, and it is impossible for them to write a poem without a succession of figures. The trope, like the rhythm, is supposed to be poetry. Hunt's essay defines poetry as imaginative pa.s.sion in versification. He can conceive of no pa.s.sion being poetry unless presented in metre with figures of speech. His essay is divided into two parts, the one dealing with imagination, or rather imagery, the other with versification. Great critic that he was, he gave us one of the weakest definitions of poetry we have.

Any one who has read _Tom Jones_ receives the impression that the long similes Fielding introduced in the Homeric manner were written half in jest of Homer, his master.

Yet the similes of the epic poets are poetry because they belong to the literature of ecstasy. If the trope arouses our emotions it is poetry not because it is an ornament but because it touches our unconscious souls. How many tropes do you find in the prose plays of Ibsen or the novels of Balzac? The ecstasy manages to get conveyed without their use.

It was the writers of the Romantic School who made the figure of speech so prominent. These writers who sought that poetry become natural, did much to make it artificial. The reason that such great poets as Keats and Sh.e.l.ley are caviare to the public is that they are rich in tropes.

The eighteenth century poets were said to be dest.i.tute of imagination chiefly because they did not make frequent use of the metaphor. The sport of critics was to make fun of the peculiar figures of earlier poets. We recall Johnson's dissecting (often with justice) of Cowley's poems. The eighteenth century was right in one respect; in their extreme unimaginativeness, they also avoided distorted imagery. Many nineteenth century poets made it a rule never to call a thing by its proper name, but by some epithet containing a metaphor. The practice is still persisted in by many of our poets, and epithet-making is one of the functions of many poets. Even prose writers like Carlyle were especially noted for it, but his epithets were often truly poetry.

I do not think that poetry then should be exclusively identified with tropes. Take a much-praised, in my opinion over-praised sonnet of Keats, _On Reading Chapman's Homer_. The whole idea of this poem is in the comparing his first discovery of Homer to the feelings of the man who discovers a new planet, and to those of the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean. (He confused Cortes with Balboa, but that is no matter.) Keats conveys to us his idea by two similes. But can this poem compare with such other sonnets of his where he lays bare his inmost emotions, where the figures of speech are not the poems as here, but merely come in incidentally; where he has a profound idea, emerging as the result of a great pa.s.sion?

A trope then is poetry only when arousing ecstasy; such poetry is not of the highest order.

For many centuries also, that alone was considered imaginative literature which introduced the supernatural or the allegory. Every student is aware how much these two elements figure in medieval poetry.

All recipes for writing poems in those days contained provisions about the use of the supernatural and allegory. It did not dawn on critics that these could be dispensed with in a great poetical work. Cervantes laughed away the use of the supernatural, while the eighteenth century realistic novel did away with the use of allegory as a means of telling a story. Nothing better than Poe's remarks has been said against the allegory as a form of literary expression. Yet the artificial supernatural agents of Ariosto and the bloodless types in the _Faerie Queene_ were held to be the truest creations of imagination. The vicious practices of great geniuses, often due to the examples of their age, are instrumental in creating misunderstanding as to what poetry is, on account of the inability of critics to praise them for their real beauties. Often the pa.s.sages that have been praised in Homer, Dante, Virgil, Milton, Spenser, Ariosto, are not the ones where the ecstasy was finest, but those where the ”imaginative” powers of the poet were thought to be the best seen, in the supernatural and allegorical portions. Yet who can doubt that the greatness of Milton is more apparent when he talks of his blindness than when he gives us the description of Lucifer with the many artificial figures? Who prefers the absurd descriptions of the monsters in Dante's _Inferno_ to the pa.s.sages where he touches on his own sorrows?

Another misapprehension about the nature of poetry lies in identifying poetry with beauty. Poetry does not necessarily deal with the conception of beauty as understood by the public or by the aestheticians, though the describing of beautiful objects and scenes is often one of its most important themes. Poetry is very little connected with the science of aesthetics, for you may know all about the nature and laws of beauty, the effect of beauty upon the nature of man, the cause of his love for beauty, and yet you may not be able to make a great poem. Croce is as much mistaken as the old aestheticians when he a.s.sumes one must study the science of aesthetics to appreciate poetry.

Pater dealt a death blow to the theory that aesthetic, or the science of abstract beauty, helps us to appreciate poetry. The critic who judges a poem need know nothing about abstract beauty, or theories of aesthetic emotion. There is little of value to be given us by the aesthetic treatises to appreciate a play of Shakespeare or Ibsen or a novel of Balzac or d.i.c.kens. Even poets like Goethe, Schiller and Lessing became absorbed in aesthetical problems, but their novels, poems and plays were written by putting out of mind metaphysical disquisitions. How are you enabled to appreciate a poem by knowing Kant's erroneous theory that the appreciation of beauty is impersonal and disinterested?

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