relation to form and matter, and given us a sane viewpoint. He analyzes Arnold's statement that poetry is a criticism of life, and Pater's assumption that all art, including poetry, aspires towards the condition of music which thus in his opinion becomes the true type or measure of consummate art. Symonds shuns both the didacticism which Arnold's view encourages, and the worship of form implied in Pater's statement; though it should be said that Pater in his essay on "Style" urges that, after all, subject matter is the deciding factor in determining great art. As Symonds says, the poet gives us rather a revelation than a criticism of life, a presentment according to his faculty for observing and displaying it; he is more a reporter and a seer than a judge. Poets take their final rank by matter and not by form. Though Symonds mentions slurringly a great poet like Baudelaire, still the following lines should be carefully pondered by many of our versifiers: "The carving of cherry-stones in verse, the turning of triolets and rondeaux, the seeking after sound and color without heed for sense, is all foredoomed to final failure." Poetry appeals to the imaginative reason, and must embody thought and emotion. As Symonds remarks, Pater's discrimination between these two is fanciful.
Poetry then must not be timid about dealing with ideas in an emotional or imaginative manner. It may even take up moral problems provided it does not sink into the commonplace ethical purposes that we have in the Psalm of Life and Excelsior, two of Longfellow's most inferior and popular poems. An idea that is the result of reason may be uttered with ecstasy, and hence there may be logic in poetry.
In his Oxford Lectures on Poetry in the essay on "Poetry for Poetry's Sake," Professor A. C. Bradley
takes issue with those who claim that it is no consequence what a poet says but how he says it, and he rightly regards as of small aesthetic value that formalist heresy which encourages men to taste poetry as though it were wine. Poetry inheres in ideas. To insist, as the poetry for poetry's sake school does, that a poem has no more lesson for us than a tree is to institute a false comparison, for the tree has a lesson for any one who finds it.
When one finishes a volume of poetry by some of the purely aesthetic poets, one is amazed at the kind of life they embody in art. It is often such a petty life, a talk to a cat, or an imitation of an image of an old poet, or a superabundant reference to flowers. It is not of the substance of which noble lives are made. We are pained to find that trite utterances or references are tricked out in gaudy images and given forth to the world in large quantities.
Verses of trivial facts and ideas set forth with artifice are not poetry. Indeed, it is a petty employment for poets to be giving vent to labored conceits about gold fish, and vases, about dandelions and kittens and lollypops, investing none of these themes with imagination or intellect. Man is stirred by thousands of emotions arising from his inability to adjust himself to surroundings, by his thwarted will and suppressed desires. He is often wrapped in gloom for want of real truthful consoling poetry. He experiences tragedies due to conflicts with relatives, friends, to lack of harmony in matrimonial or amorous affairs. His life is often being gradually snuffed out by the prevailing of stupid and deplorable customs; he is often starving or being insufficiently fed, and frequently sees his children in unhappy circumstances. He is the victim of tyrants and unjust social systems, and is engaged in soul-killing occupations. He faces the great
mysteries of existence, the riddle of the Sphinx. He witnesses cruelties of all kinds, persecution of races and individuals, mismanagement of affairs, lynchings, massacres, wars and imprisonments. Hypocrisy and vindictiveness are rife and man suffers thereby. He thirsts for beauty, he pants for happiness.
Yet poets who may find numerous and important subjects for the literature of ecstasy, are busy writing sugared verses about mosaics, candles, and puppies, and arranging vowel sounds and rhythms. Men's souls are starving to be fed with poetry and the versifiers polish and file and chisel verses on themes that interest no one. As Horace says, the mountains are in labor and the issue is but a ridiculous mouse.
Indeed it is not the subject the poet chooses that one objects to, but to the absence of ideas, or the shallowness or triviality of the idea. Burns took a daisy and made it the symbol of the racked poet, and could write about a mouse or a louse and deduce some universal idea. Shelley and Keats could endure emotions and thoughts by singing of a skylark or a nightingale. But the petty poet cannot deduce anything but a trifling idea, no matter what theme he selects.
Another feature which distinguishes the minor poet in prose or verse is his investing a trite idea with an emotion out of all proportion. He hales with enthusiasm a commonplace, he gets into ecstasy about that toward which an intelligent man displays little or no emotion. It is the distinction of the unknown author of the ancient Greek fragment On the Sublime that he deprecates the tendency to wax emotional about the unemotional. The silly ideas and emotions about which versifiers get excited are often an index to their own moral and intellectual failing, as well as their aesthetic deficiency.