Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home some hieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is an interpreter, and the interpreter's success depends upon hitting his hearer's intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null. To put it in another way—at the base of all Literature, of all Poetry, as of all Theology, stands one rock: the very highest Universe Truth is something so absolutely simple that a child can understand it. This is what Emerson means when he tells us that the great writers never seem to condescend; that yonder slip of a boy who has carried off Shakespeare to the window-seat, can feel with King Harry or Hamlet or Coriolanus, with Rosalind or Desdemona or Miranda. For the moment he is any given one of these, because any human soul contains them all. And some such thought we must believe to have been in Our Lord's mind when He said, "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." For as the Universe is one, so the individual human souls that apprehend it have no varying values intrinsically, but one equal value. They differ only in power to apprehend, and this may be more easily hindered than helped by the conceit begotten of finite knowledge. I would even dare to quote of this Universal Truth the words I once hardily put into the mouth of John Wesley concerning divine Love: "I see now that if God's love reaches up to every star and down to every poor soul on Earth, it must be something vastly simple, so simple that all dwellers on earth may be assured of it—as all who have eyes may be assured of the planet shining yonder at the end of the street—and so vast that all bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it without considering their deserts." The message, then, which one Poet brings home, is no esoteric one: as Johnson said of Gray's Elegy, "it abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo." It exalts us through the best in us, by telling it, not as anything new or strange, but so as we recognise it.
And here let us dwell a moment on Johnson's phrase, "to which every bosom returns an echo": for it recalls us to a point, which we noted indeed on p. 22, but have left (I fear) somewhat under-emphasised—the emotion that enters into poetical truth, which only by the help of emotion is apprehended; as through emotion it is conveyed, and to an emotional understanding in the hearer addresses its appeal. For the desire of man's soul after the Universal, to be in harmony with it, is (as a matter of fact, and when all pulpit eloquence has been discounted) something more than a mere intellectual attraction: a στοργη[4] rather; a yearning felt in its veins to know its fatherhood. Saint Paul goes farther and assures us that "the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation," so that "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." "And not only they," he goes on, "but ourselves also": while the pagan poet has tears that reach the heart of the transitory show: Sunt lacrimæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt—"Tears are for Life, mortal things pierce the soul."
And why not? For the complete man—totus homo—has feelings as well as reason, and should have both active, in fine training, to realise the best of him. Shelley obviously meant this when he defined Poetry as "the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." He did not mean that they are happy only in the sense of being "fortunate," felices, in such moments, but that they were happy in the sense of being "blessed," beati; and this feeling of blessedness they communicate. "We are aware," he goes on, "of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes requiring our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression ... so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a divine nature through our own, ... and the state of mind produced is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is—an atom in the universe." Every word italicised above by me carries Shelley's witness that Poetry and joyous emotion are inseparable. "Poetry," he winds up, "redeems from decay the visitations of the Divinity in Man." How can we dissociate from joy the news of such visitations either on the lips that carry or in the ears that receive?
Yet, as has been hinted, the very simplicity of it puzzles the ordinary man, and not only puzzles the philosopher but exasperates him. It annoys the philosopher, first, that the poet apparently takes so little trouble. (As a fact he takes endless trouble; but, to be sure, he saves an immense deal by going the right way to work.) All knowledge is notoriously painful (that is to say, to philosophers). Moreover, the fellow mixes it up with emotion (an integral part of man which philosophy ignores, and stultifies itself, as a rule, by ignoring). He is one with the Oracles, a suspected tribe. He idles like an Oracle, attending on inspiration, and when he has received the alleged afflatus, the fellow—so different from us—is neither to hold nor to bind. The easiest way with him seems to be a pitying contempt. "For all good poets," says Socrates sagely in the Ion, "epic as well as lyric, compose their lovely strains, not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian dances are not quite 'rational,' so the lyric poets are, so to speak, not quite 'all there.' ... They tell us," he goes on condescendingly, "that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them from the gardens and dells of the Muses; that, like the bees, they wing from one flower to another. Yes of a truth: the Poet is a light and a winged and a holy thing, without invention in him until he is inspired and out of his senses, and out of his own wit; until he has attained to this he is but a feeble thing, unable to utter his oracles." I can imagine all this reported to Homer in the Shades and Homer answering with a smile: "Well, and who in the world is denying it? I certainly did not, while I lived and sang upon earth. Nay, I never even sang, but invited the Muse to sing to me and through me. Μηνιν αειδε θεα ... Ανδρα μοι εννεπε, Μουσα.[5]—Surely the dear fellow might remember the first line of my immortal works! And if he does remember, and is only bringing it up against me that in the intervals of doing my work in life I was a feeble fellow, go back and tell him that it is likely enough, yet I fail to see how it can be any business of his, since it was only my work that I ever asked for recognition. They say that I used to go about begging a dinner on the strength of it. Did I?... I cannot remember. Anyhow, that nuisance is over sometime ago, and his kitchen is safe!"