CHAPTER I.
_WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD POEM?_
We may consider literature under three heads--Pure Poetry, the Prose Essay, and Fiction.
Poetry is unquestionably the oldest form of literature. Matthew Arnold once queried whether a people ought not to be barbarous to be really poetic. Perhaps it originated in the chant of the priests as they offered sacrifices to their gods; but the chanted tale recounting the deeds of glorious war must have come very soon after.
Mechanically, poetry consists in words arranged in measured feet and lines, corresponding almost exactly to the time element in music. Rhyme is a modern invention and in no way essential to poetry. Originally anything that could be chanted or sung was regarded as poetry. Now the song element has largely disappeared, but the requirement of measured feet and lines remains, and we may almost say that no poetry can be fully appreciated till it is read aloud.
Poetry was invented to express lofty sentiments, sentiments of religion and the noble sentiments of patriotism and brave deeds, and finally the sentiments of passionate love. It is still the loftiest form of literature, and if we would seize at a grasp all the length and breadth of the highest literary art, we should begin with the study of poetry.
True literature should express equally Truth, Nobility, and Beauty, the intellectual, the ethical, and the esthetic. Of course one poem will be pre-eminent for its beauty, another for its nobility, a third for its truth. Let us examine various types, that we may see with our own eyes and feel with our own hearts what these words mean.
Read aloud this lullaby from Tennyson’s _Princess_:
Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.
Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, Father will come to thee soon; Rest, rest, on mother’s breast, Father will come to thee soon; Father will come to his babe in the nest, Silver sails all out of the west Under the silver moon; Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.
The first thing we notice, besides the pleasing rhythm, is the musical quality of the words. There can be no melody, as melody is known in music, but in the repetition of sounds and their enchanting variations we find something that very strongly suggests musical melody.
Then we are attracted by the beauty of the images. The words come tripping like fairy forms, and we feel a picture growing out of the _camera obscura_ of our minds.
The appeal is almost wholly to our feelings; for if we stop to analyse the words and interpret their strict sense, we seem to see nothing but nonsense. The poem exists for the soothing, enchanting, dreamy beauty that seems rather to breathe in the words than to be expressed by them as words express thoughts in prose.
If there is any truth or any nobility in this poem of Tennyson’s, it would be hard to say just what they are. There is nothing ignoble; there is nothing untrue. But it seems as if we had a perfect type of beauty pure and simple.
Now let us read this little thing from Shelley:
LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY.
The fountains mingle with the river, And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one another’s being mingle;-- Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower would be forgiven, If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?
Once more we observe the rhythm and the music, though not so perfect or real as in Tennyson’s song; and we see the beauty of images, almost as beautiful as the images in Sweet and Low; but we observe that there is a new element: a thought is expressed. Beauty has come to the aid of truth; and while we are uncertain whether we care most for the beauty or for the truth, we cannot but perceive how they aid each other.
But we have not yet found the moral or ethical element. Neither Tennyson nor Shelley inspires in us nobler sentiments, or gives us courage to do and dare loftier deeds.
For the purely ethical type we might turn to the psalms of David, or that noble poem Job. But we find the same element in a simple and modern form in a poem of Longfellow’s.
A PSALM OF LIFE.
WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST.
Tell me not in mournful numbers, “Life is but an empty dream!” For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem.
Life is real, life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; “Dust thou art, to dust returnest,” Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle, In the bivouac of Life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act,--act in the living Present, Heart within and God o’er head.
Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labour and to wait.
Once more we observe how the musical flow of the language charms our ear, and how the poem makes us _feel_ that which it would teach. We miss the vibrating melody of words which we found in Tennyson and even in Shelley; and the rarely beautiful images of both the preceding poems are almost entirely absent. There is another element, however, which we could not perceive at all in those verses, and that is the element of nobility, of moral inspiration. The poem does not teach us any moral truth with which we were before unfamiliar, as a treatise on philosophy might; but it makes us _feel_ as nothing else ever has the reality of that which we know already. It actually breathes courage into us,--not the courage for heroic deeds in battle, but the heroism of living nobly the common life that is ours.
It is not fair to condemn this almost perfect poem, as some critics do, because it is lacking in the Beauty and fresh Truth that make the poems of other poets immortal; for in the whole range of poetic literature it will be difficult to find a more perfect example of nobility and heroic courage.
It will be interesting now to turn to Browning’s _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ and find the philosophy, the Truth that corresponds to this Nobility.
VI.
Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth’s smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joy three parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
VII.
For thence,--a paradox Which comforts while it mocks,-- Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.
* * * * *
XXIII.
Not on the vulgar mass Called “work,” must sentence pass, Things done that took the eye and had the price; O’er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
XXIV.
But all the world’s coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account: All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount:
XXV.
Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
The subject is almost precisely that of Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, but the object is not so much to give us courage as to confirm our courage by philosophy. The appeal is intellectual, not ethical.
Yet this is very different from a treatise by Kant or Hegel. Browning the poet makes us _feel_ the truth. It is emotion that his philosophy, his Truth, arouses in us--an intellectual emotion, but none the less an emotion. We find the measured rhythm of poetry, but it is as far as possible from the songlike music of Tennyson’s lullaby. The mechanical limits and restrictions seem an excuse for unusual and almost strained images, but images that nevertheless carry conviction to our minds. There is, too, a beauty in the conception. This poetry is philosophy, but impassioned and inspired philosophy.
Let us now read a poem still more lofty, a poem in which rare beauty, lofty nobility, and profound philosophy are mingled in almost equal proportions. I refer to Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey:
These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even unto my purer mind, With tranquil restoration.... ... that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,-- Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul; While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.... And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
The sweet melody of Tennyson’s lullaby has here given away to a deep, organ-like harmony, that swells and reverberates, while the words seem to be making the simplest and most direct of statements. Image and plain statement so mingle that we cannot distinguish them, Truth suddenly seems radiant with a rare and angelic Beauty, and the very atmosphere breathes the loftiness of Noble Purity. Unexpectedly almost we find ourselves in the presence of Divinity itself, and the humblest meets the loftiest on common ground.