Talks on the study of literature.

by Arlo Bates

A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things,

is not the whole story. In times of deepest woe it is this very remembrance which makes it possible to live on at all. The unconscious and the inevitable lesson of all true art, moreover, is that the possibility of beauty in life is compensation for the anguish which its existence entails. The poet who weeps for the lost may have no word of comfort to offer, but the fact that life itself is of supreme possibilities is shown inevitably and persuasively by the fact that he is so deeply moved. He could not be thus stricken had he not known very ecstasies of joy; and his message to the race is that such bliss has been and thus may be again. More than this, the fact that he in his anguish instinctively turns to art is the most eloquent proof that however great may be the sorrows of life there is for them an alleviating balm in æsthetic enjoyment. He may speak of

Beauty that must die,
And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips,
Bidding adieu;

but with the very thought of the brevity is coupled an exquisite sense of both beauty and joy in ever fresh renewal, so that the reader knows a subtle thrill of pleasure even at the mention of pain. Poe's proposition that poetry should be restricted to sorrowful themes probably arose from a more or less conscious feeling that the expression of despair is the surest means of conveying vividly a sense of the value of what is gone; and whether Poe went so far as to realize it or not the fact is that the passion of loss most surely expresses the possible bliss of possession. Even when it would, art cannot deny the worth and the glory of existence. The word of denial is chanted to a strain which inspires and affirms. Even when he would be most pessimistic the genuine poet must perforce preach in deathless tones the gospel of optimism.

Fourth, poetry is the original utterance of the ideas of the world. It is easy and not uncommon to regard the art of the poet as having little to do with the practical conduct of life; yet there is no man in civilization who does not hold opinions and theories, thoughts and beliefs, which he owes to the poets. Thought is not devised in the marketplace. What thinkers have divined in secret is there shown openly by its results. Every poet of genius remakes the world. He leaves the stamp of his imagination upon the whole race, and philosophers reason, scientists explore, money-changers scheme, tradesmen haggle, and farmers plough or sow, all under conditions modified by what has been divulged in song. The poet is the great thinker, whose thought, translated, scattered, diluted, spilled upon the ground and gathered up again, is the inspiration and the guide of mankind.

If this seem extravagant, think for a little. Reflect in what civilization differs from savagery; consider not the accidental and outward circumstance, but the fundamental causes upon which these depend. If you endeavor to find adequately expressed the ideals of honor, of truth, of love, and of aspiration which are behind all the development of mankind, it is to the poets that you turn instinctively. It is possible to go farther than this. Knowledge is but a perception of relations. The conception of the universe is too vast to be assimilated all at once, but every perception of the way in which one part is related to another, one fact to another, one thing to the rest, helps toward a realization of the ultimate truth. It is the poet who first discerns and proclaims the relations of those facts which the experience of the race accumulates. From the particular he deduces the general, from the facts he perceives the principles which underlie them. The general, that is, in its relation to that emotional consciousness which is the real life of man; the principles which take hold not upon material things only, but upon the very conditions of human existence. All abstract truth has sprung from poetry as rain comes from the sea. Changed, diffused, carried afar and often altered almost beyond recognition, the thought of the world is but the manifestation of the imagination of the world; and it has found its first tangible expression in poetry.

Fifth, poetry is the instructor in beauty. No small thing is human happiness, and human happiness is nourished on beauty. Poetry opens the eyes of men to loveliness in earth and sky and sea, in flower and weed, in tree and rock and stream, in things common and things afar alike. It is by the interpretation of the poet that mankind in general is aware of natural beauty; and it is hardly less true that the beauty of moral and emotional worlds would be practically unknown were it not for these high interpreters. The race has first become aware of all ethereal and elusive loveliness through the song of the poet, sensitive to see and skillful to tell. For its beauty in and of itself, and for its revelation of the beauty of the universe, both material and intangible, poetry is to the world a boon priceless and peerless.

Sixth, poetry is the creator and preserver of ideals. The ideal is the conception of the existence beyond what is of that which may and should be. It is the measure of the capability of desire. "Man's desires are limited by his perceptions," says William Blake; "none can desire what he has not perceived." What man can receive, what it is possible for him to enjoy, is limited to what he is able to wish for. The ideal is the highest point to which his wish has been able to attain, and upon the advancement of this point must depend the increasing of the possibilities of individual experience. With the growth of ideals, moreover, comes the constant, however slow, realization of them. So true is this that it almost affords a justification of the belief that whatever mankind really desires must in the end be realized from the very fact that it is desired. Be that as it may, an ideal is the perception of a higher reality. It is the recognition of essential as distinguished from accidental truth; the comprehension of the eternal principle which must underlie every fact. It is a realization of the meaning of existence; a piercing through the transient appearance to the fundamental and the enduring. The reader who finds himself caught away like St. Paul to the third heaven—"whether in the body I cannot tell; or whether out of the body I cannot tell"—has no need to ask whether life is merely eating and drinking, getting and spending, marrying and giving in marriage. He has for that transcendent moment lived the real life; he has tasted the possibilities of existence; he has for one glorious instant realized the ideal. When a poem has carried him out of himself and the material present which we call the real, then the verse has been for him as a chariot of fire in which he has been swirled upward to the very heart of the divine.

When not actually under the influence of this high exalting power of poetry most men have a strange reluctance to admit that it is possible for them to be so moved; and thus it may easily happen that what has just been said may seem to the reader extravagant and florid. There are happily few, however, to whom there have not come moments of inner illumination, few who cannot if they will call up times when the imagination has carried them away, and the delight of being so borne above the actual was a revelation and a joy not easily to be put into word. Recalling such an experience, you will not find it difficult to understand what is meant by the claim that poetry creates in the mind of man an ideal which in turn it justifies also.