_ PART I. POETRY IN GENERAL
CHAPTER I. A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND
It is a gray day in autumn. I am
sitting at my desk, wondering how to begin the first chapter of this book about poetry. Outside the window a woman is contentedly
kneeling on the upturned brown earth of her tulip-bed, patting lovingly with her trowel as she covers the bulbs for next spring's
blossoming. Does she know Katharine Tynan's verses about "Planting Bulbs"? Probably not. But I find myself dropping the
procrastinating pen, and murmuring some of the lines:
"Setting my bulbs a-row
In cold earth under the grasses,
Till
the frost and the snow
Are gone and the Winter passes--
* * * * *
"Turning the sods and
the clay
I think on the poor sad people
Hiding their dead away
In the churchyard, under the steeple.
"All poor women
and men,
Broken-hearted and weeping,
Their dead they call on in vain,
Quietly smiling and sleeping.
"Friends, now
listen and hear,
Give over crying and grieving,
There shall come a day and a year
When the dead shall be as the
living.
"There shall come a call, a foot-fall,
And the golden trumpeters blowing
Shall stir the dead with their call,
Bid them be rising and going.
"Then in the daffodil weather,
Lover shall run to lover;
Friends all trooping together;
Death and Winter be over.
"Laying my bulbs in the dark,
Visions have I of hereafter.
Lip to lip, breast to breast,
hark!
No more weeping, but laughter!"
Yet this is no way to start your chapter, suggests Conscience. Why do you not write
an opening paragraph, for better for worse, instead of looking out of the window and quoting Katharine Tynan? And then it flashes
over me, in lieu of answer, that I have just discovered one way of beginning the chapter, after all! For what I should like to do
in this book is to set forth in decent prose some of the strange potencies of verse: its power, for instance, to seize upon a
physical image like that of a woman planting bulbs, and transmute it into a symbol of the resurrection of the dead; its capacity
for turning fact into truth and brown earth into beauty; for remoulding the broken syllables of human speech into sheer music;
for lifting the mind, bowed down by wearying thought and haunting fear, into a brooding ecstasy wherein weeping is changed into
laughter and autumnal premonitions of death into assurance of life, and the narrow paths of individual experience are widened
into those illimitable spaces where the imagination rules. Poetry does all this, assuredly. But how? And why? That is our
problem.
"The future of poetry is immense," declared Matthew Arnold, and there are few lovers of literature who doubt his
triumphant assertion. But the past of poetry is immense also: impressive in its sheer bulk and in its immemorial duration. At a
period earlier than any recorded history, poetry seems to have occupied the attention of men, and some of the finest spirits in
every race that has attained to civilization have devoted themselves to its production, or at least given themselves freely to
the enjoyment of reciting and reading verse, and of meditating upon its significance. A consciousness of this rich human
background should accompany each new endeavor to examine the facts about poetry and to determine its essential nature. The facts
are indeed somewhat complicated, and the nature of poetry, in certain aspects of it, at least, will remain as always a mystery.
Yet in that very complication and touch of mystery there is a fascination which has laid its spell upon countless generations of
men, and which has been deepened rather than destroyed by the advance of science and the results of scholarship. The study of
folklore and comparative literature has helped to explain some of the secrets of poetry; the psychological laboratory, the
history of criticism, the investigation of linguistics, the modern developments in music and the other arts, have all contributed
something to our intelligent enjoyment of the art of poetry and to our sense of its importance in the life of humanity. There is
no field of inquiry where the interrelations of knowledge are more acutely to be perceived. The beginner in the study of poetry
may at once comfort himself and increase his zest by remembering that any real training which he has already had in scientific
observation, in the habit of analysis, in the study of races and historic periods, in the use of languages, in the practice or
interpretation of any of the fine arts, or even in any bodily exercise that has developed his sense of rhythm, will be of
ascertainable value to him in this new study.
But before attempting to apply his specific knowledge or aptitude to the new
field for investigation, he should be made aware of some of the wider questions which the study of poetry involves. The first of
these questions has to do with the relations of the study of poetry to the general field of Aesthetics.
1. The Study of
Poetry and the Study of Aesthetics The Greeks invented a convenient word to describe the study of poetry: "Poetics."
Aristotle's famous fragmentary treatise bore that title, and it was concerned with the nature and laws of certain types of poetry
and with the relations of poetry to the other arts. For the Greeks assumed, as we do, that poetry is an art: that it expresses
emotion through words rhythmically arranged. But as soon as they began to inquire into the particular kind of emotion which is
utilized in poetry and the various rhythmical arrangements employed by poets, they found themselves compelled to ask further
questions. How do the other arts convey feeling? What arrangement or rhythmic ordering of facts do they use in this process? What
takes place in us as we confront the work of art, or, in other words, what is our reaction to an artistic stimulus?
For an
answer to such wider questions as these, we moderns turn to the so-called science of Aesthetics. This word, derived from the
Greek
aisthanomai (to perceive), has been defined as "anything having to do with perception by the senses." But it was
first used in its present sense by the German thinker Baumgarten in the middle of the eighteenth century. He meant by it "the
theory of the fine arts." It has proved a convenient term to describe both "The Science of the Beautiful" and "The Philosophy of
Beauty"; that is, both the analysis and classification of beautiful things as well as speculation as to the origin and nature of
Beauty itself. But it should be borne in mind that aesthetic inquiry and answer may precede by thousands of years the use of the
formal language of aesthetic theory. Mr. Kipling's "Story of Ung" cleverly represents the cave-men as discussing the very topics
which the contemporary studio and classroom strive in vain to settle,--in vain, because they are the eternal problems of art.
Here are two faces, two trees, two colors, one of which seems preferable to the other. Wherein lies the difference, as far as the
objects themselves are concerned? And what is it which the preferable face or tree or color stirs or awakens within us as we look
at it? These are what we call aesthetic questions, but a man or a race may have a delicate and sure sense of beauty without
consciously asking such questions at all. The awareness of beautiful objects in nature, and even the ability to create a
beautiful work of art, may not be accompanied by any gift for aesthetic speculation. Conversely, many a Professor of aesthetics
has contentedly lived in an ugly house and you would not think that he had ever looked at river or sky or had his pulses
quickened by a tune. Nevertheless, no one can turn the pages of a formal History of Aesthetics without being reminded that the
oldest and apparently the most simple inquiries in this field may also be the subtlest and in a sense the most modern. For
illustration, take the three philosophical contributions of the Greeks to aesthetic theory, as they are stated by Bosanquet:
[Footnote: Bosanquet,
History of Aesthetic, chap. 3.]
(1) the conception that art deals with images, not
realities, i.e. with aesthetic "semblance" or things as they appear to the artist;
(2) the conception that art consists in
"imitation," which they carried to an absurdity, indeed, by arguing that an imitation must be less "valuable" than the thing
imitated;
(3) the conception that beauty consists in certain formal relations, such as symmetry, harmony of parts--in a word,
"unity in variety."
Now no one can snap a Kodak effectively without putting into practice the first of these
conceptions: nor understand the "new music" and "free verse" without reckoning with both the second and the third. The value to
the student of poetry of some acquaintance with aesthetic theory is sometimes direct, as in the really invaluable discussion
contained in Aristotle's
Poetics, but more often, perhaps, it will be found in the indirect stimulus to his sympathy and
taste. For he must survey the widespread sense of beauty in the ancient world, the splendid periods of artistic creation in the
Middle Ages, the growth of a new feeling for landscape and for the richer and deeper human emotions, and the emergence of the
sense of the "significant" or individually "characteristic" in the work of art. Finally he may come to lose himself with Kant or
Hegel or Coleridge in philosophical theories about the nature of beauty, or to follow the curious analyses of experimental
aesthetics in modern laboratories, where the psycho-physical reactions to aesthetic stimuli are cunningly registered and the
effects of lines and colors and tones upon the human organism are set forth with mathematical precision. He need not trouble
himself overmuch at the outset with definitions of Beauty. The chief thing is to become aware of the long and intimate
preoccupation of men with beautiful objects and to remember that any inquiry into the nature and laws of poetry will surely lead
him into a deeper curiosity as to the nature and manifestations of aesthetic feeling in general.
2. The Impulse to
Artistic Production Furthermore, no one can ask himself how it is that a poem comes into being unless he also raises the
wider question as to the origin and working of the creative impulse in the other arts. It is clear that there is a gulf between
the mere sense of beauty--such as is possessed by primitive man, or, in later stages of civilization, by the connoisseur in the
fine arts--and the concrete work of art. Thousands enjoy the statue, the symphony, the ode; not one in a thousand can produce
these objects. Mere connoisseurship is sterile. "The ability to produce one fine line," said Edward FitzGerald, "transcends all
the Able-Editor ability in this ably-edited universe." What is the impulse which urges certain persons to create beautiful
objects? How is it that they cross the gulf which separates the enjoyer from the producer?
It is easier to ask this question
than to find a wholly satisfactory answer to it. Plato's explanation, in the case of the poet, is simple enough: it is the direct
inspiration of the divinity,--the "god" takes possession of the poet. Perhaps this may be true, in a sense, and we shall revert
to it later, but first let us look at some of the conditions for the exercise of the creative impulse, as contemporary theorists
have endeavored to explain them.
Social relations, surely, afford one of the obvious conditions for the impulse to art. The
hand-clapping and thigh-smiting of primitive savages in a state of crowd-excitement, the song-and-dance before admiring
spectators, the chorus of primitive ballads,--the crowd repeating and altering the refrains,--the rhythmic song of laboring men
and of women at their weaving, sailors' "chanties," the celebration of funeral rites, religious processional and pageant, are all
expressions of communal feeling, and it is this communal feeling--"the sense of joy in widest commonalty spread"--which has
inspired, in Greece and Italy, some of the greatest artistic epochs. It is true that as civilization has proceeded, this communal
emotion has often seemed to fade away and leave us in the presence of the individual artist only. We see Keats sitting at his
garden table writing the "Ode to Autumn," the lonely Shelley in the Cascine at Florence composing the "West Wind," Wordsworth
pacing the narrow walk behind Dove Cottage and mumbling verses, Beethoven in his garret writing music. But the creative act thus
performed in solitude has a singular potency, after all, for arousing that communal feeling which in the moment of creation the
artist seems to escape. What he produces in his loneliness the world does not willingly let die. His work, as far as it becomes
known, really unites mankind. It fulfills a social purpose. "Its function is social consolidation."
Tolstoy made so much of
this "transmission of emotion," this "infectious" quality of art as a means of union among men, that he reduced a good case to an
absurdity, for he argued himself into thinking that if a given work of art does not infect the spectator--and preferably the
uneducated "peasant" spectator--with emotion, it is therefore not art at all. He overlooked the obvious truth that there are
certain types of difficult or intricate beauty--in music, in architecture, and certainly in poetry--which so tax the attention
and the analytical and reflective powers of the spectator as to make the inexperienced, uncultured spectator or hearer simply
unaware of the presence of beauty. Debussy's music, Browning's dramatic monologues, Henry James's short stories, were not written
for Tolstoy's typical peasant. They would "transmit" to him nothing at all. But although Tolstoy, a man of genius, overstated his
case with childlike perversity, he did valuable service in insisting upon emotion as a basis for the art-impulse. The creative
instinct is undeniably accompanied by strong feeling, by pleasure in the actual work of production and in the resultant object,
and something of this pleasure in the harmonious expression of emotion is shared by the competent observer. The permanent
vitality of a work of art does consist in its capacity for stimulating and transmitting pleasure. One has only to think of Gray's
"Elegy" and the delight which it has afforded to generations of men.
Another conception of the artistic impulse seeks to ally
it with the "play-instinct." According to Kant and Schiller there is a free "kingdom of play" between the urgencies of necessity
and of duty, and in this sphere of freedom a man's whole nature has the chance to manifest itself. He is wholly man only when he
"plays," that is, when he is free to create. Herbert Spencer and many subsequent theorists have pointed out the analogy between
the play of young animals, the free expression of their surplus energy, their organic delight in the exercise of their muscles,
and that "playful" expenditure of a surplus of vitality which seems to characterize the artist. This analogy is curiously
suggestive, though it is insufficient to account for all the phenomena concerned in human artistic production.
The play theory,
again, suggests that old and clairvoyant perception of the Greeks that the art-impulse deals with aesthetic appearances rather
than with realities as such. The artist has to do with the semblance of things; not with things as they "are in themselves"
either physically or logically, but with things as they appear to him. The work of the impressionist painter or the imagist poet
illustrates this conception. The conventions of the stage are likewise a case in point. Stage settings, conversations, actions,
are all affected by the "
optique du théâtre" they are composed in a certain "key" which seeks to give a
harmonious impression, but which conveys frankly semblance and not reality. The craving for "real" effects upon the stage is
anti-aesthetic, like those gladiatorial shows where persons were actually killed. I once saw an unskilful fencer, acting the part
of Romeo, really wound Tybalt: the effect was lifelike, beyond question, but it was shocking.
From this doctrine of aesthetic
semblance or "appearance" many thinkers have drawn the conclusion that the pleasures afforded by art must in their very nature be
disinterested and sharable. Disinterested, because they consist so largely in delighted contemplation merely. Women on the stage,
said Coquelin, should afford to the spectator "a theatrical pleasure only, and not the pleasure of a lover." Compare with this
the sprightly egotism of the lyric poet's
"If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?"
A certain aloofness is
often felt to characterize great art: it is perceived in the austerity and reserve of the Psyche of Naples and the Venus of
Melos:
"And music pours on mortals
Its beautiful disdain."
The lower pleasures of the senses of taste and touch, it is
often pointed out, are less pleasurable than the other senses when revived by memory. Your dinner is
your dinner--your
exclusive proprietorship of lower pleasure--in a sense in which the snowy linen and gleaming silver and radiant flowers upon the
table are not yours only because they are sharable. If music follows the dinner, though it be your favorite tune, it is
nevertheless not yours as what you have eaten is yours. Acute observers like Santayana have denied or minimized this distinction,
but the general instinct of men persists in calling the pleasures of color and form and sound "sharable," because they exist for
all who can appreciate them. The individual's happiness in these pleasures is not lessened, but rather increased, by the
coexistent happiness of others in the same object.
There is one other aspect of the artistic impulse which is of peculiar
importance to the student of poetry. It is this: the impulse toward artistic creation always works along lines of order. The
creative impulse may remain a mystery in its essence, the play of blind instinct, as many philosophers have supposed; a portion
of the divine energy which is somehow given to men. All sorts of men, good and bad, cultured and savage, have now and again
possessed this vital creative power. They have been able to say with Thomas Lovell Beddoes:
"I have a bit of fiat in my
soul,
And can myself create my little world."
The little world which their imagination has created may be represented only by
a totem pole or a colored basket or a few scratches on a piece of bone; or it may be a temple or a symphony. But if it be
anything more than the mere whittling of a stick to exercise surplus energy, it is ordered play or labor. It follows a method. It
betrays remeditation. It is the expression of something in the mind. And even the mere whittler usually whittles his stick to a
point: that is, he is "making" something. His knife, almost before he is aware of what he is doing, follows a pattern--invented
in his brain on the instant or remembered from other patterns. He gets pleasure from the sheer muscular activity, and from his
tactile sense of the bronze or steel as it penetrates the softer wood. But he gets a higher pleasure still from his pattern, from
his sense of making something, no matter how idly. And as soon as the pattern or purpose or "design" is recognized by others the
maker's pleasure is heightened, sharable. For he has accomplished the miracle: he has thrown the raw material of feeling into
form--and that form itself yields pleasure. His "bit of fiat" has taken a piece of wood and transformed it: made it expressive of
something. All the "arts of design" among primitive races show this pattern-instinct.
But the impulse toward an ordered
expression of feeling is equally apparent in the rudimentary stages of music and poetry. The striking of hands or feet in unison,
the rhythmic shout of many voices, the regular beat of the tom-tom, the excited spectators of a college athletic contest as they
break spontaneously from individual shouting into waves of cheering and of song, the quickened feet of negro stevedores as some
one starts a tune, the children's delight in joining hands and moving in a circle, all serve to illustrate the law that as
feeling gains in intensity it tends toward ordered expression. Poetry, said Coleridge, in one of his marvelous moments of
insight, is the result of "a more than usual state of emotion" combined "with more than usual order."
What has been said about
play and sharable pleasure and the beginning of design has been well summarized by Sidney Colvin: [Footnote: Article on "The Fine
Arts" in
Encyclopaedia Britannica.]
"There are some things which we do because we must; these are our necessities. There
are other things which we do because we ought; these are our duties. There are other things which we do because we like; these
are our play. Among the various kinds of things done by men only because they like, the fine arts are those of which the results
afford to many permanent and disinterested delight, and of which the performance, calling for premeditated skill, is capable of
regulation up to a certain point, but that point passed, has secrets beyond the reach and a freedom beyond the restraint of
rules."
3. "Form" and "Significance" in the Arts If the fine arts, then, deal with the ordered or harmonious
expression of feeling, it is clear that any specific work of art may be regarded, at least theoretically, from two points of
view. We may look at its "outside" or its "inside"; that is to say at its ordering of parts, its pattern, its "form," or else at
the feeling or idea which it conveys. This distinction between form and content, between expression and that which is expressed,
is temptingly convenient. It is a useful tool of analysis, but it is dangerous to try to make it anything more than that. If we
were looking at a water-pipe and the water which flows through it, it would be easy to keep a clear distinction between the form
of the iron pipe, and its content of water. But in certain of the fine arts very noticeably, such as music, and in a diminished
degree, poetry, and more or less in all of them, the form is the expression or content. A clear-cut dissection of the component
elements of outside and inside, of water-pipe and water within it, becomes impossible. Listening to music is like looking at a
brook; there is no inside and outside, it is all one intricately blended complex of sensation. Music is a perfect example of
"embodied feeling," as students of aesthetics term it, and the body is here inseparable from the feeling. But in poetry, which is
likewise embodied feeling, it is somewhat easier to attempt, for purposes of logical analysis, a separation of the component
elements of thought (i.e. "content") and form. We speak constantly of the "idea" of a poem as being more or less adequately
"expressed," that is, rendered in terms of form. The actual form of a given lyric may or may not be suited to its mood,
[Footnote: Certainly not, for instance, in Wordsworth's "Reverie of Poor Susan."] or the poet may not have been a sufficiently
skilful workman to achieve success in the form or "pattern" which he has rightly chosen.
Even in poetry, then, the distinction
between inside and outside, content and form, has sometimes its value, and in other arts, like painting and sculpture, it often
becomes highly interesting and instructive to attempt the separation of the two elements. The French painter Millet, for
instance, is said to have remarked to a pupil who showed him a well-executed sketch: "You can paint. But what have you to say?"
The pupil's work had in Millet's eyes no "significance." The English painter G. F. Watts often expressed himself in the same
fashion: "I paint first of all because I have something to say.... My intention has not been so much to paint pictures that will
charm the eye as to suggest great thoughts that will appeal to the imagination and the heart and kindle all that is best and
noblest in humanity.... My work is a protest against the modern opinion that Art should have nothing to say intellectually."
On
the other hand, many distinguished artists and critics have given assent to what has been called the "Persian carpet" theory of
painting. According to them a picture should be judged precisely as one judges a Persian rug--by the perfection of its formal
beauty, its harmonies of line, color and texture, its "unity in variety." It is evident that the men who hold this opinion are
emphasizing form in the work of art, and that Millet and Watts emphasized significance. One school is thinking primarily of
expression, and the other of that which is expressed. The important point for the student of poetry to grasp is that this
divergence of opinion turns upon the question of relative emphasis. Even pure form, or "a-priori form" as it has sometimes been
called,--such as a rectangle, a square, a cube,--carries a certain element of association which gives it a degree of
significance. There is no absolutely bare or blank pattern. "Four-square" means something to the mind, because it is intimately
connected with our experience. [Footnote: See Bosanquet,
Three Lectures on Aesthetic, pp. 19, 29, 39, and Santayana,
The Sense of Beauty, p. 83.] It cannot be a mere question of balance, parallelism and abstract "unity in variety." The
acanthus design in architectural ornament, the Saracenic decoration on a sword-blade, aim indeed primarily at formal beauty and
little more. The Chinese laundryman hands you a red slip of paper covered with strokes of black ink in strange characters. It is
undecipherable to you, yet it possesses in its sheer charm of color and line, something of beauty, and the freedom and vigor of
the strokes are expressive of vitality. It is impossible that Maud's face should really have been
"Faultily faultless, icily
regular, splendidly null,
Dead perfection, no more."
Nevertheless, though absolutely pure decorative beauty does not exist,
the artist may push the decorative principle very far, so far, indeed, that his product lacks interest and proves tedious or
nonsensical. There is "nonsense-verse," as we shall see later, which fulfills every condition for pure formal beauty in poetry.
Yet it is not poetry, but only nonsense-verse.
Now shift the interest from the form to the meaning contained in the work of
art, that is, to its significance. An expressive face is one that reveals character. Its lines are suggestive of something. They
are associated, like the lines of purely decorative beauty, with more or less obscure tracts of our experience, but they arouse a
keen mental interest. They stimulate, they are packed closely with meaning, with fact, with representative quality. The same
thing is true of certain landscapes. Witness Thomas Hardy's famous description of Egdon Heath in
The Return of the Native.
It is true of music. Certain modern music almost breaks down, as music, under the weight of meaning, of fact, of thought, which
the composer has striven to make it carry.
There is no question that the principle of significance may be pushed too far, just
as the principle of decorative or purely formal beauty may be emphasized too exclusively. But is there any real antagonism
between the elements of form and significance, beauty and expressiveness? This question has been debated ever since the time of
Winckelmann and Lessing. The controversy over the work of such artists as Wagner, Browning, Whitman, Rodin has turned largely
upon it.
Browning himself strove to cut the difficult aesthetic knot with a rough stroke of common sense:
"Is it so
pretty
You can't discover if it means hope, fear,
Sorrow or joy? Won't beauty go with these?"
[Footnote: "Fra Lippo Lippi."]
He tried again in the well-known passage from
The Ring and the Book:
"So may you paint your picture, twice show
truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
So note by note bring music from your mind
Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven
dived,--
So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside."
How Whistler, the author
of
Ten O'Clock and the creator of exquisitely lovely things, must have loathed that final line! But Bosanquet's carefully
framed definition of the beautiful, in his
History of Aesthetic, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims
of form and significance: "The beautiful is that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense-perception or
imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium." That is to say, in less
philosophical language, that as long as you observe the laws of formal beauty which belong to the medium in which you are
working, you may be as expressive or significant as you like. But the artist must be obedient to the terms of his chosen medium
of expression; if he is composing music or poetry he must not break the general laws of music or poetry in order to attempt that
valiant enterprise of saving a soul.
4. The Man in the Work of Art Though there is much in this matter of content
and form which is baffling to the student of general aesthetic theory, there is at least one aspect of the question which the
student of poetry must grasp clearly. It is this: there is nothing in any work of art except what some man has put there.
What
he has put in is our content question;
what shape he has put it into is our form question. In Bosanquet's more
technical language: "A man is the middle term between content and expression." There is doubtless some element of mystery in what
we call creative power, but this is a part of man's mystery. There is no mystery in the artist's material as such: he is working
in pigments or clay or vibrating sound or whatever other medium he has chosen. The qualities and possibilities of this particular
medium fascinate him, preoccupy him. He comes, as we say, to think in terms of color or line or sound. He learns or may learn in
time, as Whistler bade him, "never to push a medium further than it will go." The chief value of Lessing's epoch-making
discussion of "time-arts" and "space-arts" in his
Laokoon consisted in the emphasis laid upon the specific material of the
different arts, and hence upon the varying opportunities which one medium or another affords to the artist. But though human
curiosity never wearies of examining the inexhaustible possibilities of this or that material, it is chiefly concerned, after
all, in the use of material as it has been moulded by the fingers and the brain of a particular artist. The material becomes
transformed as it passes through his "shop," in some such way as iron is transformed into steel in a blast furnace. An apparatus
called a "transformer" alters the wave-length of an electrical current and reduces high pressure to low pressure, or the reverse.
The brain of the artist seems to function in a somewhat similar manner as it reshapes the material furnished it by the senses,
and expresses it in new forms. Poetry furnishes striking illustrations of the transformations wrought in the crucible of the
imagination, and we must look at these in detail in a subsequent chapter. But it may be helpful here to quote the testimony of
two or three artists and then to examine the psychological basis of this central function of the artist's mind.
"Painting is
the expression of certain sensations," said Carolus Duran. "You should not seek merely to copy the model that is posed before
you, but rather to take into account the impression that is made upon the mind.... Take careful account of the substances that
you must render--wood, metal, textures, for instance. When you fail to reproduce nature
as you feel it, then you falsify
it.
Painting is not done with the eyes, but with the brain."
W. W. Story, the sculptor, wrote: "Art is art because it is
not nature.... The most perfect imitation of nature is therefore not art.
It must pass through the mind of the artist and be
changed. Art is nature reflected through the spiritual mirror, and tinged with all the sentiment, feeling, passion of the
spirit that reflects it."
In John La Farge's
Considerations on Painting, a little book which is full of suggestiveness
to the student of literature, there are many passages illustrating the conception of art as "the representation of the artist's
view of the world." La Farge points out that "drawing from life is an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the
moment is merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings, former aspirations, former habits, images that
we have cared for, and through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entire educated part of our nature."
One
of La Farge's concrete examples must be quoted at length: [Footnote:
Considerations on Painting, pp. 71-73. Macmillan.]
"I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men, artists who were great friends, great cronies,
asking each other all the time, how to do this and how to do that; but absolutely different in the texture of their minds and in
the result that they wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they were well known to the public are
concerned.
"What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the
hills that lay before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in any way the subject for any future use. We
merely had the intention to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to express to each other what we liked
in it. There were big clouds rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and meadow-land below us, and the
ground fell away suddenly before us. Well, our three sketches were, in the first place, different in shape; either from our
physical differences, or from a habit of drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually indicates--as you know, or
ought to know--whether we are looking far or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more nearly a square;
the distance taken in to the right and left was smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and down--that is
to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of sky above--was greater. In each picture the clouds were treated with
different precision and different attention. In one picture the open sky above was the main intention of the picture. In two
pictures the upper sky was of no consequence--it was the clouds and the mountains that were insisted upon. The drawing was the
same, that is to say, the general make of things; but each man had involuntarily looked upon what was most interesting to him in
the whole sight; and though the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously preferred a beauty or an
interest of things different from what his neighbour liked.
"The colour of each painting was different--the vivacity of colour
and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole; and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a
specimen of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes.
"I
wish you to understand, again, that we each thought and felt as if we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the
first desire of expressing ourselves, and I think would have been very much worried had we not felt that each one was true
to nature. And we were each one true to nature.... If you ever know how to paint somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of
the student who has not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of his brain, you will always give to
nature, that is to say, what is outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see it--which is
yourself."
Such bits of testimony from painters help us to understand the brief sayings of the critics, like
Taine's well-known "Art is nature seen through a temperament," G. L. Raymond's "Art is nature made human," and Croce's "Art is
the expression of impressions." These painters and critics agree, evidently, that the mind of the artist is an organism which
acts as a "transformer." It receives the reports of the senses, but alters these reports in transmission and it is precisely in
this alteration that the most personal and essential function of the artist's brain is to be found.
Remembering this, let the
student of poetry now recall the diagram used in handbooks of psychology to illustrate the process of sensory stimulus of a
nerve-centre and the succeeding motor reaction. The diagram is usually drawn after this fashion:
Sensory stimulus
Nerve-centre Motor Reaction
_____________________________O___________________________
------------------->
------------------->
The process is thus described by William James: [Footnote:
Psychology, Briefer
Course, American Science Series, p. 91. Henry Holt.]
"The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical
irritant, be this as gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the waves of light, convey the excitement
to the nervous centres. The commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but discharges through the efferent nerves,
exciting movements which vary with the animal and with the irritant applied."
The familiar laboratory experiment
irritates with a drop of acid the hind leg of a frog. Even if the frog's brain has been removed, leaving the spinal cord alone to
represent the nervous system, the stimulus of the acid results in an instant movement of the leg. Sensory stimulus, consequent
excitement of the nerve centre and then motor reaction is the law. Thus an alarmed cuttlefish secretes an inky fluid which colors
the sea-water and serves as his protection. Such illustrations may be multiplied indefinitely. [Footnote: See the extremely
interesting statement by Sara Teasdale, quoted in Miss Wilkinson's
New Voices, p. 199. Macmillan, 1919.] It may seem
fanciful to insist upon the analogy between a frightened cuttlefish squirting ink into sea-water and an agitated poet spreading
ink upon paper, but in both cases, as I have said elsewhere, "it is a question of an organism, a stimulus and a reaction. The
image of the solitary reaper stirs a Wordsworth, and the result is a poem; a profound sorrow comes to Alfred Tennyson, and he
produces
In Memoriam." [Footnote:
Counsel upon the Reading of Books, p. 219. Houghton Mifflin Company.]
In the
next chapter we must examine this process with more detail. But the person who asks himself how poetry comes into being will find
a preliminary answer by reflecting upon the relation of "impression" to "expression" in every nerve-organism, and in all the
arts. Everywhere he must reckon with this ceaseless current of impressions, "the stream of consciousness," sweeping inward to the
brain; everywhere he will detect modification, selections, alterations in the stream as it passes through the higher nervous
centres; everywhere he will find these transformed "impressions" expressed in the terms of some specific medium. Thus the temple
of Karnak expresses in huge blocks of stone an imagination which has brooded over the idea of the divine permanence. The Greek
"discus-thrower" is the idealized embodiment of a typical kind of athlete, a conception resulting from countless visual and
tactile sensations. An American millionaire buys a "Corot" or a "Monet," that is to say, a piece of colored canvas upon which a
highly individualized artistic temperament has recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as it has been
interpreted by Corot's or Monet's eye and brain and hand. A certain stimulus or "impression," an organism which reshapes
impressions, and then an "expression" of these transformed impressions into the terms permitted by some specific material: that
is the threefold process which seems to be valid in all of the fine arts. It is nowhere more intricately fascinating than in
poetry. _