Elizabeth Atkins

“ Poets have been telling us over and over again that the distinctive element in the poetic nature is harmony. What is harmony? It is the reconciliation of opposites, says Eurymachus in the Symposium. It is union of the finite and the infinite, says Socrates in the Philebus. Do the poet's desires point in opposite directions? But so, it seems, do the poplars that stand tiptoe, breathless, at the edge of the dreaming pool. The whole secret of the aesthetic repose lies in the duality of the poet's desire. His imagination enables him to see all life as two in one, or one in two ”

“ Browning made the only apparent trace of Sordello left in the world, the snatch of song which the peasants sing on the hillside. Yet, though his name be lost, the poet's immortality is sure. For like Socrates in the Symposium, his desire is not merely for a fleeting vision of beauty, but for birth and generation in beauty. And the beauty which he is enabled to bring into the world will never cease to propagate itself. ”

“ Unless there is some sense of a universal force, taking the shape of the individual loved one, there can be nothing suggestive in love. Instead of waking the lover to the beauty in all of life, as we have said, it would, as the non-lover has asserted, blind him to all but the immediate object of his pursuit. Then, the goal being reached, there would be no reason for the poet's not achieving complete satisfaction in love, for there would be nothing in it to suggest any delight that he does not possess. ”

“ It is true that to the poet liberty is an inner thing, not always synonymous with suffrage. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, all came to distrust the machinery of so-called freedom in society. Likewise Browning was not in favor of too radical social changes, and Mrs. Browning went so far as to declare, "I love liberty so much that I hate socialism." Mob rule is as distasteful to the deeply thoughtful poet as is tyranny, for the liberty which he seeks to bring into the world is simply the condition in which every man is expressing the beauty of his truest self. ”

“ The poet's immediate intuition is superior to the philosopher's toilsome research, he asserts, because it captures ideality alive, whereas the philosopher can only kill and dissect it. As Wordsworth phrases it, poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." Philosophy is useful to the poet only as it presents facts for his synthesis; Shelley states, "Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." ”

“ Like Dante, we seem disposed to faint at every step in our revelation. Now a doubt crosses our minds whether the child of genius in his crippled moments is better fitted than the rest of us to point out the pathway to sacred enthusiasm. It appears that little verse describing the poet's afflatus is written when the gods are actually with him. In this field, the sower sows by night. Verse on inspiration is almost always retrospective or theoretical in character. It seems as if the intermittence of his inspiration filled the poet with a wistful curiosity as to his nature in moments of soaring. ”

“ It is obvious that in the poet's opinion there is only one means by which he can help humanity, and that is by helping men to express their essential natures; in other words, by setting them free. Liberty is peculiarly the watch-word of the poets. To the philosopher and the moralist, on the contrary, there is no merit in liberty alone. Men must be free before they can seek wisdom or goodness, no doubt, but something beside freedom is needed, they feel, to make men good or evil. But to the poet, beauty and liberty are almost synonymous. ”

“ We have called the poet an egotist, and surely, his attitude toward the blind rout who have had no glimpse of the heavenly vision, is one of contemptuous superiority. But like the priest in the temple, all his arrogance vanishes when he ceases to harangue the congregation, and goes into the secret place to worship. And toward anyone who sincerely seeks the revelation, no matter how feeble his powers may be, the poet's attitude is one of tenderest sympathy and comradeship. ”

“ One might think that the poet has less cause for rebellion against the flesh than have other men, inasmuch as the bonds that enthrall feebler spirits seem to have no power upon him. A blind Homer, a mad Tasso, a derelict Villon, an invalid Pope, most wonderful of all—a woman Sappho, suggest that the differences in earthly tabernacles upon which most of us lay stress are negligible to the poet, whose burning genius can consume all fetters of heredity, sex, health, environment and material endowment. ”

“ The charge of the puritan appears no more just to the poet than that of the philosopher. How can it be true, as the puritan maintains it to be, that the poet lacks the spirit of reverence, when he is constantly incurring the ridicule of the world by the awe with which he regards himself and his creations? No power, poets aver, is stronger to awaken a religious mood than is the quietude of the beauty which they worship. ”

“ The philosopher, to whom a sense-impression is a mere needle-prick, useful only as it starts his thoughts off on a tangent from it to the separate world of ideas, is not unnaturally misled by the poet's total absorption in the world of sense. But the poet is thus absorbed, not, as the philosopher implies, because he denies, or ignores, the existence of ideas, but because he cannot conceive of disembodied ideas. Walter Pater's reason for rejecting philosophy as a handicap to the poet was that philosophy robs the world of its sensuousness, as he believed. ”

“ Is the essence of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so constitutionally Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly Aristotelians. Plato seems to say that ideality is not, as a matter of fact, the essence of objects. It is a light reflected upon them, as the sun's light is reflected upon the moon. ”

“ Now just here we who assail the poet are likely to turn our guns upon one another, for we are brought up against the stone wall of age-old dispute over the function of the poet. He should hold up his magic mirror to the physical world, some of us declare, and set the charm of immortality upon the life about us. Far from it, others retort. The poet should redeem us from the flesh, and show us the ideal forms of things, which bear, it may be, very slight resemblance to their imitations in this world. ”

“ Ernest Dowson's Villanelle of the Poet's Road is a typical expression of the mood. Dowson's biography leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his lines,
Wine and women and song, Three things garnish our way: Yet is day overlong. Three things render us strong, Vine-leaves, kisses and bay. Yet is day overlong. Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills, rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. ”

“ Is there not danger that the poet, once launched on a career as an agitator, will no longer have time to dream dreams? If he bases his claims of worth on his ability as a "carpet-duster," [Footnote: See Aurora Leigh.] as Mrs. Browning calls the agitator, he is merely unsettling society,—for what end? He himself will soon have forgotten—will have become as salt that has lost its savor. Nothing is more disheartening than to see men straining every nerve to make other men righteous, who have themselves not the faintest appreciation of the beauty of holiness. ”

“ While our poets thus assert, occasionally, that the unblushing nudity of their pride is a conscious departure from convention, they would not have us believe that they are fundamentally different from older singers. One seldom finds an actual poet, of whatever period, depicted in the verse of the last century, whose pride is not insisted upon. The favorite poet-heroes, Aeschylus, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Chatterton, Keats, Byron, are all characterized as proud. ”

“ If we dropped from consideration all but poets of unquestionable merit, we should not be more successful in detecting a single clear note, binding all their voices together. When the ideal poet of Shelley is set against that of Byron, or that of Matthew Arnold against that of Browning, there is no more unison than when great and small in the poetic world are allowed to speak indiscriminately. ”

“ He has identified the philosopher with the scientist, he says, and rightly, for the philosopher, the seeker for truth alone, can never get beyond the realm of science. His quest of absolute truth will lead him, first, to the delusive rigidity of scientific classification, then, as he tries to make his classification complete, it will topple over like a lofty tower of child's blocks, into the original chaos of things.
What! the philosopher may retort, the poet speaks thus of truth, who has just exalted himself as the supreme truth-teller, the seer? ”

“ As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. ”

“ If poetry is the work of the reason, then equilibrium of soul, which is so sorely upset by passionate love, is doubtless very necessary. But the romanticist represents the poet, not as one drawing upon the resources within his mind, but as the vessel filled from without. His afflatus comes upon him and departs, without his control or understanding. Poetical inspiration, to such a temperament, naturally assumes the shape of passion. Bryant's expression of this point of view is so typical of the general attitude as to seem merely commonplace. ”

“ For in the intervals of his inspiration the poet himself becomes, as has been reiterated, a mere man, and except for the memories of happier moments that abide with him, he is as dull as his reader. So when he labors to make his inspiration articulate he is not coldly manipulating his materials, like a pedagogue endeavoring to drive home a lesson, but for his own future delight he is making the spirit of beauty incarnate. ”

“ It seems that the philistine's quarrel with the poet arises from the fact that, unlike the makers of phonograph records, the poet dares to follow feeling in defiance of public sentiment. Like the conservative that he is, the philistine gloats over the poet's lapses from virtue because, in setting aside mass-feeling as a gauge of right and wrong, and in setting up, instead, his own individual feelings as a rule of conduct, the poet displays an arrogance that deserves a fall. The philosopher, like the philistine, may tolerate feeling within limits. ”

“ In the eighteenth century critics were prone to confuse the spiritual element in the poet's nature with intellectualism, and the sensuous element with emotionalism. Such criticism tended to drive the poet either into an arid display of wit, on the one hand, or into sentimental excess, on the other, and the native English distrust of emotion led eighteenth century critics to praise the poet when the intellect had the upper hand. But surely poets have made it clear enough that the intellect is not the distinctive characteristic of the poet. To be intelligent is merely to be human. ”

“ Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute poetry. ”

“ Is the artist the imitator of the physical world, or the revealer of the spiritual world? He is both, inevitably, if he is a great poet. Hence there is a duality in his moral life. If one aspect of his genius causes him to be rapt away from earthly things, in contemplation of the heavenly vision, the other aspect no less demands that he live, with however pure a standard, in the turmoil of earthly passions. ”

“ Now while we are sadly meditating our inability to batter our way through this obstacle to perfect clarity, the poets championing the opposing views, like Plato's sophistic brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, proceed to knock us from one to the other side, justifying their self-centered verse by either theory. Do we maintain that the poet should reflect the life about him? Then, holding the mirror up to life, he will naturally be the central figure in the reflection. Do we maintain that the poet should reveal an ideal world? ”

“ If we refuse the poet's revelation, we have no better way of arriving at the truth. The scientist offers us little in this field; and his account of inspiration is as cold and comfortless as a chemical formula. Of course the scientist is amused by this objection to him, and asks, "What more do you expect from the effusions of poets? Will not whatever secret they reveal prove an open one? What will it profit you to learn that the milk of Paradise nourishes the poetic gift, since it is not handled by an earthly dairy?" ”

“ But when Landor so warmly champions Southey, and Swinburne springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. ”

“ The moral instincts of the philosopher are unerring, Plato declares, because the philosopher's attention is riveted upon the unchanging idea of the good which underlies the confusing phantasmagoria of the temporal world. The poets retort that the moral instincts of the poet, more truly than of the philosopher, are unerring, because the poet's attention is fixed upon the good in its most ravishing aspect, that of beauty, and in this guise it has an irresistible charm which it cannot hold even for the philosopher. ”

“ When one reads such expressions as Byron's;
Fame is the thirst of youth,—but I am not
So young as to regard men's frown or smile
As loss or guerdon of a glorious lot,
[Footnote: Childe Harold.]
one wonders. Perhaps the highest genius takes absolutely no account of fame, as the sun-god asserts in Watts-Dunton's poem, Apollo in Paris:
I love the song-born poet, for that he
Loves only song—seeks for love's sake alone
Shy Poesie, whose dearest bowers, unknown
To feudaries of fame, are known to thee. ”