Arthur Quiller-Couch

“ The Poet "makes"—that is to say, creates—which is a part of the divine function; and he makes—using man's highest instruments, thought and speech—harmonious inventions that answer the harmony we humbly trace in the firmament fashioned, controlled, upheld, by divine wisdom. ”

“ Yet the philosopher will go on to the end of time despising the poet, who grasps at mysteries per saltum, neglecting the military road of logic.
Shall we then, by a violent recoil, abandon Mathematics and Philosophy and commit our faith to Music? Music is, above all things, harmonious: Music has the emotion in which Mathematics and Philosophy have been found wanting. Music can be "personal"; Music, since the invention of counterpoint, is capable of harmonies deeper and more intricate than any within the range of human speech. In short, against Poetry, Music can set up a very strong claim. ”

“ For my part I always consider Milton's Macbeth the most fascinating poem—certainly, if play it were, the most fascinating play—ever unwritten. But of this any man may be sure; that (since they were both great poets) one made, as the other would have made, a story of far more value to us than Shakespeare or Milton or any man before or after could have made by a strict biography of Macbeth, the man as he lived. ”

“ Words, in short, are the outward and visible signs of thought: that, and something more—since you may prove by experiment that the shortest and simplest train of thought cannot be followed unless at every step the mind silently casts it into the mould of words.
As an instrument for reconciling Man's inward harmony with the great outer harmony of the Universe, Poetry is notoriously imperfect. Men have tried others therefore—others that appeared at first sight more promising, such as Music and Mathematics—yet on the whole to their disappointment. ”

“ When a poet can, as Shakespeare does here, seize upon a Universal truth and lay it bare; when, apprehending passion in this instance, he can show it naked, the master of gods and levelling queens with milkmaids—totus est in armis idem quando nudus est Amor ”

“ And some such thought we must believe to have been in Our Lord's mind when He said, "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." For as the Universe is one, so the individual human souls that apprehend it have no varying values intrinsically, but one equal value. ”

“ When we can separate light and illumination, life and motion, the convex and the concave of a curve, then will it be possible for thought to tread speech under foot and to hope to do without it—then will it be conceivable that the vigorous and fertile intellect should renounce its own double, its instrument of expression and the channel of its speculations and emotions. ”

“ She doth abstract the Universal kinds,
Which then reclothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through our senses to our minds,
—which exactly describes the whole process. Having laid bare the Idea, our Poet, turning from analysis to synthesis, proceeds to reclothe it in new particulars of his own inventing, carefully chosen that they may strike home hardest upon the hearer's perceptions. Now that which strikes home hardest on a man is a tale which he can grasp by the concretest images conveyed in the concretest language. ”

“ Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home some hieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is an interpreter, and the interpreter's success depends upon hitting his hearer's intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null. To put it in another way—at the base of all Literature, of all Poetry, as of all Theology, stands one rock: the very highest Universe Truth is something so absolutely simple that a child can understand it. ”

“ The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mould—
They scratch with their pens in the mould of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start,
For the Devil mutters behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
The philosophers did poetry no great harm by being angry with it as an "inspired" thing: for that, in a measure, it happens to be. They did it far more harm when they took it seriously and made it out to be a form of teaching. ”

“ If he haul rope or weigh anchor, setting out to sea, or haul up his ship on a beach, he has proved by experiment that these operations are performed more than twice as easily when done to a tune. But these are dull, less than half-conscious, imitations of the great harmony for which, when he starts out to understand and interpret it consciously, he must use the most godlike of all his gifts. Now the most godlike of all human gifts—the singular gift separating Man from the brutes—is speech. ”

“ Numbers inhere in all harmony. By numbers harmony can be expressed far more severely than by Poetry, and so successfully up to a point, that poets have borrowed the very word to dignify their poor efforts. They "lisp in numbers"—or so they say: and the curious may turn to the Parmenides, to Book vii. of The Republic and others of the Dialogues and note how Plato, hunting on the trail of many distinguished predecessors, pursues Mathematics up to the point where, as a means of interpreting to Man the Universal harmony, Mathematics, like Philosophy, inevitably breaks down. ”

“ Yet, as has been hinted, the very simplicity of it puzzles the ordinary man, and not only puzzles the philosopher but exasperates him. It annoys the philosopher, first, that the poet apparently takes so little trouble. (As a fact he takes endless trouble; but, to be sure, he saves an immense deal by going the right way to work.) All knowledge is notoriously painful (that is to say, to philosophers) . Moreover, the fellow mixes it up with emotion (an integral part of man which philosophy ignores, and stultifies itself, as a rule, by ignoring) . ”

“ What we have described the Poet as doing for men—drawing forth the inner harmonies of the soul and attuning them to the Universal—is educative in the truest sense as in the highest degree. So long as we remember this, the old dispute whether the aim of Poetry be to teach or to delight is seen to be futile: for she does both, and she does the one by means of the other. ”

“ A sensible man does not aspire to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades: but he may, and does, aspire to understand something of the universal harmony in which he and they bear a part, if only that he may render it a more perfect obedience. ”

“ It is "the Universal" (το χαθολου [2] ) : and as soon as we realise this we know ourselves to be on the same track as Aristotle, after all. "Imitation," as he uses it, is not an apish or a slavish imitation; it is no mere transcribing or copying of phenomena as they pass (he even allows that the poet may "imitate" men as "better than they are") : it is an expressing, in fiction and harmonious speech, intelligible to his fellow-men, of what truth, order, harmony, and "law" the poet's mind has apprehended in the outer Universe. ”

“ There is no reason on earth—she has offended against no moral law on earth or in the heavens—that could possibly condemn the Duchess to the hellish tortures she is made to endure. At the worst she has married a man beneath her in station. To punish her in Webster's extravagant fashion every other character, with the whole story of the play, has to be dehumanised. ”

“ To "idealise" in the true sense is to disengage an "idea" of all that is trivial or impertinent or transient or disturbing, and present it to men in its clearest outline, so that its own proper form shines in on the intelligence, as you would wipe away from a discovered statue all stains or accretions of mud or moss or fungus, to release and reveal its true beauty. ”

“ For the desire of man's soul after the Universal, to be in harmony with it, is (as a matter of fact, and when all pulpit eloquence has been discounted) something more than a mere intellectual attraction: a στοργη [4] rather; a yearning felt in its veins to know its fatherhood. Saint Paul goes farther and assures us that "the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation," so that "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." ”

“ Now the other and only equally important truth in the world is that this macrocosm of the Universe, with its harmony, cannot be apprehended at all except as it is focussed upon the eye and intellect of Man, the microcosm. ”

“ Yet always they excel your philosophers, insomuch as they accept the transcendental as really transcendental and do not profess to instruct the Almighty in it; and chiefly, perhaps, they excel your philosophers by opposing a creativeness, potential at any rate, against a certain and foredoomed barrenness. For the philosophers would get at the secret by reason, contemning emotion; whereas the poet knows that creation implies fatherhood, and fatherhood implies emotion, even passionate emotion. ”

“ The quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry is notorious and inveterate: and at ninety-nine points in the hundred Philosophy has the better of the dispute; as the Fox in the fable had ninety-nine ways of evading the hounds, against the Cat's solitary one. ”

“ There is this difference between a story and a poem, 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 erection of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. ”

“ Such men, we know, are not like ourselves. What happens to them may serve for The Police News. Tragedy does not deal with the worthless. How then are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, beings like ourselves, to fall into crime so heinous? Again Shakespeare strips the Idea bare: their trespass comes through ambition, "last infirmity of noble minds," under the blinding persuasion of witchcraft, which (an actual belief in Shakespeare's time) is a direct negation of the moral law, and puts Satan in place of God. ”

“ For by the nature of things there happens to be something of the pedant in every philosopher and the incurable propensity of the pedant is to remove everything—but Literature especially—out of the category to which it belongs and consider it in another with which it has but a remote concern. ”

“ This consists, not in the capacity for melody, but in the capacity for harmony in the musician's sense...." "Why, of course," is my comment upon this: "every art can easily claim excellence, if it take that excellence in its own sense." Mr. Watts-Dunton proceeds: "The finest music of Æschylus, of Pindar, of Shakespeare, of Milton, is after all, only a succession of melodious notes, and in endeavouring to catch the harmonic intent of strophe, antistrophe and epode in the Greek chorus and in the true ode (that of Pindar) , we can only succeed by pressing memory into our service." ”

“ And be it observed, to start with, that in clearing and cleansing the Idea for us (in the manner described) he does but employ a process of Selection which all men are employing, all day long and every day of their lives, upon more trivial matters; a process indeed which every man is constantly obliged to employ. Life would be a night-mare for him, soon over, if he had to take account, for example, of every object flashed on the retina of his eye during a country walk. How many millions of leaves, stones, blades of grass, must he not see without seeing? ”

“ Yet I should still object to the word "disintegrated" as applied to thought, unless it be allowed that emotion undergoes the same process at the same time and both meet in one solution. To speak more plainly, Music is inferior to Poetry because, of any two melodies in its counterpoint, both may be (and in practice are) emotional and vague: while of any two melodies in the counterpoint of Poetry one must convey thought and therefore be intelligible. ”

“ In his daily life he is for ever seeking after harmony in avoidance of chaos, cultivating personal habits after the clock; in his civic life forming governments, attempting hierarchies, laws, constitutions, by which (as he hopes) a system of society will work in tune, almost automatically. When he fights he has learnt that his fighting men shall march in rhythm and deploy rhythmically, and they do so to regimental music. ”

“ Poetry goes on, "certain men, granted to dwell among us, of more delicate mental fibre than their fellows; men whose minds have as it were exquisite filaments which they throw out to intercept, apprehend and conduct home to Man stray messages between the outer mystery of the Universe and the inner mystery of his soul ”

“ He idles like an Oracle, attending on inspiration, and when he has received the alleged afflatus, the fellow—so different from us—is neither to hold nor to bind. The easiest way with him seems to be a pitying contempt. "For all good poets," says Socrates sagely in the Ion, "epic as well as lyric, compose their lovely strains, not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. ”

“ The disaster of a tragic figure must come, and be seen to come, through some fault—or, at least, some mistake—of his own. But again he must not be wholly bad, for the disasters of the wholly bad do not affect us save with disgust. ”

“ He cannot for purposes of tragedy be wholly good: for not only is this extremely rare in real life, and almost inconceivable, but the ruin of a wholly good man would merely shock, without teaching us anything. ”

“ Natural Science, allowing that these questions are probably unanswerable, contents itself with mapping and measuring what it can of the various forces. But all agree about the harmony: and when a Newton discovers a single rule of it for us, he but makes our assurance surer. ”

“ It is as it were the interpenetration of a divine nature through our own, ... and the state of mind produced is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is—an atom in the universe." Every word italicised above by me carries Shelley's witness that Poetry and joyous emotion are inseparable. ”

“ So Philosophy has almost all the say in this matter, until Poetry interjects the fatal question, "I beg your pardon, Madam, but do you happen to be the Almighty, or are you playing Egeria to his Numa? You are constructing admirably comprehensive schemes and systems for His guidance, if your hints will but be taken. But if you address yourself to Man, you will find that his business is not at all to comprehend the Universe ”