Platform Monologues

The poetical pessimists will not dispassionately examine plain facts. They take English literature and point to the now remote date of Shakespeare; they take Italian literature and remind us that Dante has been dead nearly six centuries; they take the literature of Greece and triumphantly observe that its greatest poet, Homer, was its earliest. They ignore the essential fact that transcendent genius is the phenomenon of a thousand years; that we must not demand a recurrence even of second-rate genius in every generation or even in every century. Without the altogether extraordinary genius of Shakespeare, English poetry culminates, not in the age of Elizabeth, but in the nineteenth century. Without the unique marvel of the mind of Dante, the poetry of Italy is at its highest in the sixteenth century of Tasso and Ariosto, not in the fourteenth century of the subtle amorist Petrarch. Remove the one name of Homer, and you bring the crowning glory of Grecian poetry at least three or four centuries later, to the era of Pindar, Æschylus, and Sophocles. We cannot judge the laws of general progress by unique instances of individual genius. These are the comets and meteors of the literary heavens. To judge of a generation's capacity for poetry, we must compare, not a Shakespeare with a Shelley or a Wordsworth, but the average spirit, the average power of insight and expression, of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, with those of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats. And who will maintain, that in force of imagination, in truth of vision, in grasp of the ideal side of things, in beautiful expression of elusive thoughts, in lyric rapture, the Elizabethans are equal to the Georgian and Victorian poets?

Our own day is, we boast, the age of light and reason. The days of Chaucer were times of childlike ignorance, credulity, naïveté. Yet who will tell us that Tennyson looks out on nature or on man with a colder, less imaginative, eye than Chaucer? That the advances of science have made him gaze less lovingly, less wonderingly, upon any created thing? That the progress of philosophy has hardened Browning's heart to accesses of passion, or cramped his creative imagination? And yet it should be so, if enlightenment means decay of poetry.

Science, we are told, and philosophy are but an inclement atmosphere for poetry to thrive in. Their spiteful frost nips the young buds and tender shoots of imagination, of fancy, of "sentiment." Well, at what date was modern science born? At what date philosophy? Does philosophy date from Kant, or from Bacon, or from Plato? Does modern science begin with Darwin, with Newton, with Copernicus, or with Aristotle? Let us, for argument's sake, accept the common account that the age par excellence of science and philosophy began in England, in France, in Germany, somewhere about the end of the seventeenth century. Since that time we have doubtless discovered and elaborated many a detail. None the less the air of all the eighteenth century was full of scientific inquiry and mechanical invention, full of philosophical discussion, full of religious and moral scepticism. If ever there was an age when it looked to the pessimist as if science and philosophy would change the aspect of nature and the heart of man, it was that eighteenth century. Now note that, if some holder of Macaulay's view had risen up in the year 1770 or thereabouts, he might have addressed his contemporaries to great effect in words like these: "The age of philosophy and science is upon us all, and poetry is dead. See how in Germany not a single worthy note of a poet's singing is heard amid the din of critics, philosophers, jurists, scientists. See how in France we find historians, letter-writers, philosophers, moralists, but not a verse worth hearing since the dry-light prose-versicles of Voltaire. Observe how in England our so-called poetry is but prose sawed into lines of five feet each, and contains not one drop of the sap of nature, unless it be some suggestion in Thomson and a half-ashamed trace in Collins or in Gray. As for the last really great figure, Pope, and all his rhyming brood, they are but arguers, critics, moralists, describers, satirists in verse. They show no inspiration, and could show none, because science and reasoning forbade it to them. The wings of their imaginations are cropped close by the hard facts and knowledge of our time. Let us cry Ichabod over poetry, for its glory is departed, and departed for ever."

It would scarcely have been an unnatural thing for an observant lover of poetry at that date to make such a speech, and, without the light of later experience, it would have been impossible to confute him. Yet had that same man lived the length of another human life, seen still more scientists make their steps forward in discovery, seen another crop of even subtler philosophers at their analytic work, witnessed the "Triumph of Reason and Democracy" in the shape of the French Revolution:—had he lived to see all this, he would have beheld meanwhile something which shows how fallible is prophecy. He would have seen, to wit, a most marvellous, rich and widespread outburst of the strenuous natural poetry he thought dead. From amid the critical rationalism of Germany would come the fullest, most fervid voices of poetry with which that land had ever echoed—voices full of vigour and passion, full of imagination and music, singing of romance and story, of nature and man and human life—the voices of Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Wieland. From France would be heard Béranger's stirring songs and the deepening romantic notes of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. From Scotland would sound the passionate song of Burns and later the romantic lays of Scott; and soon would arise in England the graver tones of Wordsworth, Nature's high-priest, the deep, half-romantic, half-religious music of the mystic Coleridge, the fiery ecstasies of Shelley, the rebellious melancholies of Byron, the sensuous raptures of Keats,—these and other tones of less compass or less power.

And as our mistaken pessimist listens, what then becomes of his theory that science and philosophy have killed the poet in mankind? Might not some reasoner of the more cheerful school urge in triumph just the contrary? Might he not say that it was precisely the new light shed by the dawning Renaissance which elicited the poetry of Dante's day? That it was precisely the flood of illumination on English thought in the sixteenth century which called forth the Elizabethan outburst? That it was precisely the eminent scientific and critical toiling of the eighteenth century which led up to that pronounced and unanimous romantic movement of recent times in England, Germany and France? We need not at present strongly urge that argument. It is enough to have shown the unsoundness of its contrary.

It may, however, be answered that science hitherto is only a preface to what is to come, that even the last generation of discovery is nothing in comparison with the expansion of our knowledge and the enslavement of natural forces which must be looked for in the years on which we enter. Well, we are not sure of that. It has been a foible of many an era to think itself remarkable as a time when "the world's great age begins anew." But let us grant, if you choose, that we are moving into an incomparable age of scientific light and clearness, and at the same time of unprecedented social change. Is it necessary that this clear light of science should be dry and cold? And is it inevitable that the destined social existence shall be arid and hard, cramping, drab, and dreary? Will analysis destroy all wonder, or classification annihilate all beauty? And will human nature be so transformed by some system of social contract that a man will no longer feel love or grief, or any other of those emotions which have been his, and increasingly his, since the days of Adam?

There is, we have seen, no basis in history for assuming that poetry will cease. Is there any ground in speculation? The assertion goes that imagination will be shrivelled by the chill of scientific practicality, that minds trained and informed by physical and mental science will possess too overpowering a sense of logic, too habitual a consciousness of the matter-of-fact, to indulge in the visions and imaginings which are supposed to be the life of poetry. It is urged that, when every inch of the world has rendered its hard statistics to the blue-books, and when the variety of the nations has disappeared before common appliances and familiar intercourse, there will be nothing to stimulate the romantic fancy, nay, romance in any sort will but come into conflict with man's ever-present realization of actual conditions.

Is this the just account? Is it just to the meaning of "poetry" or just to the nature of mankind?

One might perhaps fall back on what a man of science declared to Mr. Stedman: "The conquest of mystery leads to greater mystery: the more we know, the greater the material for the imagination." Or one might assert by right of intuition that, in face of the new world of science, we shall feel as Shakespeare's Miranda felt in the presence of new realities:—

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That hath such people in't!

We too may expect to call it a "brave new world," to exclaim "how beauteous"—and not only how beauteous, but how awesome—"Nature is!" "how many goodly creatures are there here!" And in this goodliness, beauty, and awesomeness poetry will find unfailing material, while it seeks to express the emotions they evoke and to relate them with power to man's inner life. The objects of poetry are everywhere; and Wordsworth, who should know, if any one can know, will have it that "the remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed."

One might, then, simply fall back on statements such as these. But we need a closer treatment. We require to see in what manner poetry and science will work side by side as partners and not, as enemies, struggle with each other until poetry is exterminated.

Whatever the future may be like, there are, and will be, two sides to human life. There is the material, commonplace, and in a sense, vulgar existence; there is also life's ideal side. Give a man, who is a man and not a mere biped animal, all the comforts and enjoyments of physical life, good food, good habitation, safety and health, even a clear intellect, and give him nothing else. Would he not scorn and weary of such a life as that, which merely adds empty day to empty day, so many ciphers of existence, which, after all, amount to nothing? There is in man, just in proportion as he rises above the beasts, a demand for something which he holds more vital, for the things of the mind and spirit. We live, not by bread alone, but "we live by admiration, hope and love." Man must have ideals and aspirations and mental ecstasies. And this, in other words, means that he must live the poetical as well as the material half of life.

What is our own state of mind—yours and mine—when we contemplate the threatened unpoetical future? Is it not one of alarm and disgust? Do we not almost rejoice to think that we ourselves shall not live to shiver in its bleakness? When we contemplate such a time, we say with Wordsworth—

Great God, I'd rather be
A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on the pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn

than the dull and melancholy prospect which is conjured up before us. Even in this age of science, we entertain such feelings. And if we ourselves feel so, it is simply because humanity is so constituted, and no science, no democracy, no learning, invention or legislation can ever drive out human nature from human beings. It is on grounds like these that Matthew Arnold declares, "More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without Poetry our science will appear incomplete." "Incomplete" is a right word, though a very weak one; "incomplete," not untrue, not pernicious, but terribly inadequate. For there are two manners of looking at the universe and at the life of men, and human nature demands that we should exercise and enjoy them both. "The words poetry, philosophy, art, science," says Renan, "betoken not so much different objects proposed for the intellectual activity of man, as different manners of looking at the same object—which object is existence in all its manifestations," and, "if we understand by poetry the faculty which the soul has of being touched in a certain manner, of giving forth a certain sound of a particular and indefinable nature in the face of the beauty of things, he who is not a poet is not a man." True poetry does not imply fiction, unreality, misrepresentation. The true poet is not a deluded dreamer and a visionary. The scientist tells us certain facts about existing things, the poet draws forth the beauties and suggestions of those facts, brings them into moral and emotional connexion with ourselves, makes them, at his best, effective on our conduct. Human nature can never be satisfied with the bare objective facts. It must "disengage the elements of beauty" and goodness from them.

It is too generally assumed that to know a thing scientifically is to divest it of all touching beauty, of all romantic glamour, of all spiritual suggestion,—to make it, in fact, incapable of yielding poetry. We can, indeed, no longer call the sun a god and construct myths of Phœbus, nor can we seriously picture the moon descending to dally with Endymion. We can no longer see Hamadryads in the oaks or Naiads in the streams. We do not hear Zeus or Thor in the thunderclap, nor recognize in volcanic eruptions the struggles of imprisoned Titans breathing flame. But what of that? Does the essence of poetry lie at all in myths and superstitions? Because we know of what the sun is made, and how many miles distant he is, do we find his risings and settings less moving in their endless splendours? Do we less marvel at the stupendous order of the solar and astral circles? Do we feel less awe before the infinitude of space and the insignificance of our own selves? Do waterfalls "haunt us like a passion" any the less because the water is chemically known as H_2O and because we believe no longer in nymphs and water-sprites? On the contrary, if there is one fact in the history of literature more certain than another, it is the fact that the passion for natural beauty and the emotions it evokes are things of very modern date. In France Rousseau, in England Wordsworth, are practically the first to give to them that loving rapture of expression into which we of this scientific age enter so naturally.

It is true that Keats, in a moment of that petulance which is one of his less happy characteristics, writes like this:—

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine,
Unweave a rainbow.

But assuredly it was in his haste that Keats let slip those lines. To him at least, loving as he did the "principle of beauty in all things," to him, to whom a "thing of beauty is a joy for ever," the rainbow was not given in the dull catalogue of common things. Nor is it to us, though we might render ever so scientifically accurate an account of the origin of rainbows.

Shelley, who had dabbled in chemistry for the love of science, knew, as well as we know, that a cloud is but moisture evaporated from the earth, that there is no Valkyrie in it. But that does not hinder him from making such a cloud a thing of life, and causing it to sing—

I wield the flail of the lashing hail
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.

Neither his studies in natural science, nor his economic and moral readings in Godwin and Condorcet could repress, or even tended to repress, the flight of Shelley's imagination. Nor did Goethe's original and almost professional scientific work in botany, anatomy, and optics prevent the creation of his Faust or the singing of his touching ballads. And when we question the compatibility of historical knowledge with the poetry of epic or romantic creations, do we suppose that Tennyson, while writing the Idylls of the King, believed in the stories of Arthur, of Lancelot, of Galahad, or of the Holy Grail? When Morris composed the Earthly Paradise, had his imagination no freedom of flight because stubborn facts of history and geography clipped its pinions?

The truth is that there are two ways of looking at existing things, two ways of handling them; and neither way is false. The scientist's way we all understand. It is the way of the microscope and the crucible. It arrives at definite physical facts. It sets forth the material constitution and physical laws of objects. But to the poet, says Mrs. Browning—

Every natural flower which grows on earth
Implies a flower on the spiritual side.

And what is true of flowers is true of suns and stars and living creatures and all that science contemplates. Science is knowledge, while poetry, asserts Wordsworth, is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge"; it is "the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." There is a poetic truth, and there is a scientific truth, compatible one with the other, complementary one to the other. Perhaps the most prosaic mind that ever existed was that of Jeremy Bentham, and "poetry," said that worthy, "is misrepresentation." One may be pardoned for a passing impatience when the poetical side of man is treated as a kind of amiable delusion; when one hears the shallow argument, containing a begged question, that, inasmuch as the poet imagines in things what is really not there at all, he is so far a wanderer from the truth and an enemy of science. The answer is very brief; the poet does not imagine something which is not there. A beauty or a suggestion is a truth, and the poet sees a beauty or a suggestion. He would indeed be false and an enemy to science if he said that a primrose by the river's brim was a buttercup, or that it was red when it is yellow, but it is no fiction when he declares that the primrose tells him this or that of nature or of God. It may not tell the scientist anything of the kind, but that is because the scientist does not look for such a thing in it, does not understand or seek to understand its language. "The eye of the intellect," says Carlyle, "sees in all objects what it brings with it the means of seeing." Say, if you like, that it is really the poet himself who puts the language, the message, into flower or tree or waterfall. That only removes the argument a step further back. How is he prompted to find such language there?

And who knows but that, by his exquisite sensibility and gift of sympathy, the poet may be discovering truths more valuable to us in the end than all the truths of science? The Newtons and Faradays and Lyells perform their several tasks in the region of great literal physical facts and laws; the Shakespeares and Wordsworths and Shelleys perform theirs in the region of things ideal, in the expression of potent suggestions and stimulations. We cannot afford to treat as weak fantastic enthusiasts those to whom

The meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Nor can we too soon recognize the fact that what the world requires is the combined result of both forms of genius. It requires that the genius of science and the genius of poetry should unite their powers and their discoveries into one grand harmony of happiness in faith and hope and love.

One can do no better than quote from Wordsworth a passage which shows how the moral mood is transformed through the medium of the eye, when the eye gazes with poetic sympathy on nature:—

O then what soul was his, when on the top
Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
Rise up and bathe the world in light! He looked—
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none
Nor any voice of joy. His spirit drank
The spectacle; sensation, soul and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.

There are people who find little satisfaction in Wordsworth. His reputation is a puzzle to them. They look for fine passages and too rarely discover them. They judge him by the test of mere brilliance of language, not by the higher and truer poetic gift, the power of seeing "into the life of things," the power and exquisite feeling whereby outward facts are brought to serve as inward forces.

And, quite apart from this function as the receiver of impressions and the communicator of them; quite apart from the function of the poet as moral and spiritual teacher working side by side with that teacher of facts, the man of science, there is room, and will always be room, for the artist-poet who simply refreshes and entertains. For poetry lies also in epics and romances, in "feigned history" and descriptions, when the poet, as Longinus says, "by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul," makes it seem to us that we behold those things which he paints—a feat which he performs through his gift of imagination, whereby he bodies forth the shapes of things unknown and gives to airy nothings of beauty and delight and pathos a local habitation and a name. The world of the future will find refreshment in such creations no less than the world of the present. We know that romantic novels are unreal, but we read them with keen enjoyment none the less. So those romantic poems the Idylls of the King and The Earthly Paradise, like The Tempest, or the Faerie Queene, though they cause us no real illusion as to fact, nevertheless absorb our interest, and charm us with their unliteral beauties. We know in our hearts that there is no magic and no fairyland. But it is a pitiably dull and mollusc mind which finds no delight in peering through those

Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

There remains, then, this function too of the poet who gives "exquisite expression" to an "exquisite impression"—the function of entertaining us nobly with tender thought and touching story, embodied in words of beauty, and graced with melodious cadences. Of such sort is the writer of the Earthly Paradise, who confesses his own modest aims in words like these:—

Of heaven or hell I have no power to sing;
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.

But rather, when aweary of your mirth,
From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh,
And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,
Grudge every minute as it passes by,
Made the more mindful that the sweet days die,
Remember me a little then, I pray,
The idle singer of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beat with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

We have dealt with the poet's place in the world of growing scientific light. We might also treat of the poet's place in the world of social progress. But he is a bold man who will prophesy whither society is tending. To some of us, its evolution has no terrors. But, whatever be the course of institutions, whatever the changing shapes of the social organism, there is one conviction we may most firmly hold. It is that, as ecstasies of love and grief, hope and fear, joy and suffering, must still exist, so the poet will ever exist to give them utterance. The drama, the lyric, the elegy, can never be effete so long as men have hearts and feel with them.

But why, it may be asked, should all this exquisite expression of nature and man and life take shape in verse? Why should we not, with Carlyle, declare verse out of date, an artificial thing, which expresses under crippling encumbrances what could be expressed in prose more clearly and more truthfully? To this question we may reply that rhymes and recurrences of equal syllables are indeed no essentials of true poetry. Poetry has existed without them, and will exist without them. But, if not rhymes and equal syllables, yet rhythm and melody, moving concurrences of sounds, must for all time be elements of poetic utterance. The reason should be manifest. There is an indefinable sympathy between the spoken sound and the conceiving mood of the poet. The poet conceives in moments of unusual sensibility, his mental part is vibrating, and that sensibility lends a corresponding movement to his language. When a poet says of himself—

I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing,

he expresses the truth that rhythm and melody lend themselves spontaneously to an inspiring thought. Poetry, like good music, comes of the possession of the movement. The mood in which poetry is conceived is the same mood in which men burst forth without premeditation into song. The thoughts which come to the poet in his exaltation are, therefore, naturally wedded to melody and cadence.

Moreover, not only is a rhythmic music the natural utterance of impassioned thought for him who speaks. It is the necessary instrument for inducing the proper, the receptive, mood in him who hears. We know how it is with music, when all the air is vibrating and chanting with some vast organ-swell. We know how we are stirred to our inmost depths simply by mere harmony and sequence of sounds. We do not know why it is so, why our mood should be attuned to sorrow, gaiety, enthusiasm, heroism, meditation, by the hearing of music in its various kinds. We do not know, either, why the mere shapes of the sublime architecture of some great abbey or cathedral, or the blended colours of its deep-damasked window-stains, should fill our hearts with devout or poignant aspirations. Yet we know that the fact is so. And it is the same with poetry. The rhythm and melody which come spontaneously from the poet's mood dispose the hearer in the self-same way; they fit him to receive what the other brings. Verse, as we now understand that term, poetry need not be. But though it may look like prose because the lines stretch all across the page and cannot be measured by so many iambics or anapæsts, yet, if it be real poetry, heart-felt and heart-moving, it will be but a delusive prose, a prose of infinitely subtle rhythms and harmonies. It will be as far removed as the Homeric hexameter from the pedestrian motion of cold argument.

Poetry will never fail us until nature fails. We may miss the transcendent voices now, but we have had during this century more than a century's usual share, and with the first widespread rise of some new moral fervour or lofty hope and aim the great poet cannot be wanting to give it shape in thrilling verse.

Poetry will never fail us. The poetry of nature will not fail us. So long as the sun shall each night and morning glorify the heavens with his inexhaustible splendours, or the majestic moon ride in her mysterious silence between the everchanging isles of cloud; so long as innumerable starry worlds shine down their unspeakable peace into human hearts; so long as the flower shall open out its loveliness, dance in the breeze, shed its perfumes, and then close its petals in sleep and drink in the refreshment of the unfailing dew; so long as the tree shall put forth its tender greenery of leaf in the spring, blossom into gold and fire in summer and in the autumn bow down with fruits; so long as water shall leap and foam and thunder in cataracts down the mountain-side, or ripple and smile over the pebble or under the fern—so long shall the heart of man respond to sun and moon and stars, to flower and tree and stream, and there shall be poetry.

And as man's vision, intensified by the lens of science, pierces deeper and deeper into the universe of the ineffably great and the illimitably small, and as his wonder and awe increase with what they feed upon, so will the finer souls of humankind be thrilled and thrilled again with rich new suggestions and exquisite emotions, and they shall express them in poetry.

The poetry of man will not fail us. So long as man has a heart wherewith to love another better than himself, to feel the joy of possession or the pang of loss, to glow with pride at a nation's glories or mourn in its dejection, so long shall the lyric and the elegy, in whatsoever shape, create themselves ever afresh.

Till all our life, its institutions, and its beliefs are perfect: till man has no doubts, no fears, no hopes: till he has analysed all his emotions and despises them: till the heavens above and the earth beneath can be read like a printed scroll: till nature has yielded up her last mystery: till that day poetry will exist among men.

And we may dare to assert that the future of poetry is destined to be greater than its past, that Tennyson's prayer will be fulfilled—

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell,
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before
But vaster,

And the expression of that music will be poetry.

A SELECTION FROM THE
CATALOGUE OF BOOKS

PUBLISHED BY

Thomas C. Lothian,

100, FLINDERS STREET,
MELBOURNE.

INDEX OF TITLES.

THE SPIRIT OF THE CHILD

A quaint love story linked to the rest of the subject matter by the same mystic touch, lends variety to the Book and strengthens the one golden thread of purpose, which is briefly summed up in the title.

THINGS WORTH THINKING ABOUT

"In Australia he should be known as a public benefactor. The volume before us being nothing less than a contribution to the Commonwealth."—The Athenæum.

LATER LITANIES

LITANIES OF LIFE

THE HOUSE OF BROKEN DREAMS. A MEMORY

A Review: "She who gave us the well-loved 'Litanies of Life' clothes beautiful thoughts in beautiful language.... As a picture of idyllic love and sympathy between mother and son, even unto death—and beyond—it has rarely been surpassed, and helps us to realize the wondrous truth that 'love is heaven, and heaven is love.'"—The Register.

THE BEST BOYS' BOOK OF STORIES.

TOLD IN THE DORMITORY