It is not necessary to carry this analysis farther. The object of undertaking it is to impress upon the reader the fact that in poetry form is an essential element in the language of the art. The student must realize that the poet means his rhythm as truly as and in the same measure that he means the thought; and that to attempt to appreciate poetry without sensitiveness to melody is as hopeless as would be a similar attempt to try to appreciate music. When Wordsworth said that poetry is inevitable, he meant the metre no less than the thought; he wished to convey the fact that the impassioned mood breaks into melody of word as the full heart breaks into song. The true poem is the embodiment of what can be expressed in no other way than by that especial combination of idea, suggestion, and sound. The thought, the hint, and the music are united in one unique and individual whole.
[XVIII]
POETRY AND LIFE
Vitally to appreciate what poetry is, it is necessary to realize what are its relations to life. Looked at in itself its essentials are emotion which is capable of taking entire possession of the consciousness, and the embodiment of this emotion by the combined effects of imaginative language and melodious form. It is still needful, however, to consider how this art acts upon human beings, and why there has been claimed for it so proud a pre-eminence among the arts.
Why, for instance, should Emerson speak of the embodiment of mere emotion as "the only verity," Wordsworth as "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," and why does Mrs. Browning call poets "the only truth-tellers"? The answer briefly is: Because consciousness is identical with emotion, and consciousness is life. For all practical purposes man exists but in that he feels. The universe concerns him in so far as it touches his feelings, and it concerns him no farther. That is for man most essential which comes most near to the conditions of his existence. Pure and ideal emotion is essential truth in the sense that it approaches most nearly to the consciousness,—that is, to the actual being of the race.
I am aware that this sounds dangerously like an attempt to be darkly metaphysical; but it is impossible to talk on high themes without to some extent using high terms. It is useless to hope to put into words all the mysteries of the relations of art to life, yet it is not impossible to approximate somewhat to what must be the truth of the matter, although in doing it one inevitably runs the risk of seeming to attempt to say what cannot be said. What I have been endeavoring to convey will perhaps be plainer if I say that for purposes of our discussion man is practically alive only in so far as he realizes life. This realization of life, this supreme triumph of inner consciousness, comes to him through his feelings,—indeed, is perhaps to be considered as identical with his feelings. His sensations affect him only by the emotions which they excite. His emotion, in a word, is the measure of his existence. Now the emotion of man always responds, in a degree marked by appreciation, to certain presentations of the relation of things, to certain considerations of the nature of human life, and above all to certain demonstrations of the possibilities of human existence. If these are made actual and clear to the mind, they cannot fail to arouse that engrossing realization which is the height of consciousness. To enable a man to seize with his imagination the ideal of love or hate, of fear or courage, of shame or honor, is to make him kindle and thrill. It is to make him for the time being thoroughly and richly alive, and it is to increase greatly his power of essential life. These are the things which most deeply touch human creatures; they are the universal in that they appeal to all sane hearts and minds; they are the eternal as measured by mortal existence because they have power to touch the men of all time; hence they are the real truths; they are, for beings under the conditions of earthly existence, the only verities.
The ordinary life of man is not unlike the feeble flame of a miner's lamp, half smothered in some underground gallery until a draught of vital air kindles it into sudden glow and sparkle. Most human beings have but a dull flicker of half-alive consciousness until some outward breath causes it to flash into quick and quivering splendor. Poetry is that divine air, that breeze from unscaled heights of being, the kindling breath by which the spark becomes a flame.
It is but as a means of conveying the essential truth which is the message of poetry, that the poet employs obvious truth. The facts which impress themselves upon the outer senses are to him merely a language by means of which he seeks to impart the higher facts that are apprehended only by the inner self; those facts of emotion which it is his office as a seer to divine and to interpret. The swineherd and the wandering minstrel saw the same wood and sky and lake; but to one they were earth and air and water; while to the other they were the outward and visible embodiment of the spirit of beauty which is eternal though earth and sea and sky vanish. To Peter Bell the primrose by the river's brim was but a primrose and nothing more; to the poet it was the symbol and the embodiment of loveliness, the sign of an eternal truth. To the laborer going afield in the early light the dewdrops are but so much water, wetting unpleasantly his shoes; to Browning it was a symbol of the embodiment in woman of all that is pure and holy when he sang:—