Portraits and Speculations

by Arthur Ransome

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

It is impossible to deny the power of suggestion wielded by those four lines, a power utterly disproportionate to what is actually said. The kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed tiger of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and on either side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the phosphorescence of another speech, that we cannot so easily overhear. And who shall speak in fit terms of its potentiality? That glowing image, that surprised address; not in the enumeration of such things shall we come upon its secret.

The test of a formula is, that it shall fit. It must enable us to co-ordinate scattered knowledge, and throw into a clear perspective the jumble of loose statements and scraps of information whose value we cannot but recognise, although they have remained outside previous schemes and done little more than disturb the equilibrium of once-established theories. It is a comfort and a joy to a thinker when he can say that a formula of his has almost been proposed by minds that have approached his problem along roads other than his own. When he can find statements, true in themselves but inadequate, pegging out, as it were, the ground from which his formula has been dug, he can feel that it is no mere chance that has given it a momentary appearance of usefulness. He can speak of it with the solid confidence that it has behind it the collaboration of his predecessors.

We can bring such confidence to the use of this formula of kinetic and potential speech, for to whatever problem of literary theory or phenomenon of the history of literature we apply it, we find that it has been almost stated by those who have separately considered that problem or phenomenon. It smelts the ore that they have dug, and forges a weapon for the attack not of one problem, but of all.

For example; though kinetic speech may be translated without loss from one language to another, potential speech would not be potential but kinetic if we were able to express it otherwise than by itself. This is what Shelley means when he denies the possibility of the translation of poetry, though he does not perceive the full reason, but only that the poetic quality of a poem is partly dependent on a succession of inimitable sounds. His statement, incomplete though it is, is a recognition of the duality of poetic speech. He does not for a moment contend that we cannot render the meaning; he sees that the meaning is not all. The body is one thing and the soul is another. If we leave the soul behind we have nothing but dead matter, fit for manure or food. Life, or poetry, delicate-footed, mysterious, gracious with knowledge of her mystery, is passed away and we cannot recapture her.

Sometimes, indeed, she goes without our interference, and disappears only because of our neglect. There are poems that many men cannot perceive to be poetry. There are others, once poetry, now no longer so. Let us apply our formula to these phenomena, and first to the varying popularity of poetry, since our solution of this question will help us in solving the other. We shall find that the nearer poetry approaches to kinetic speech, the more easily is it apprehended by the multitude. Kinetic speech secures its effects by the presentation of facts, situations and stories, which are stuff not so fine as to slip through the coarse meshes of the general understanding. This explains the immediate and wide popularity of such poets as Longfellow, Scott, and Macaulay. Because prose, as a rule, depends more nearly on its kinetic than on its potential utterance, it is, as a rule, the more widely read. When, as in the hands of some nineteenth century writers, it emphasizes the potential element of speech it correspondingly narrows its public. Whenever poetry of high potentiality is read by a large public it will be found that its potential speech is condoned for them or hidden from them by more than usually vigorous kinetic speech. For potential speech secures its effects by suggestion. There is a bloom on its wings that a callous retina does not perceive. It is like a butterfly that has visited flowers and scatters their scent in its flight. The scent and the fluttering of its bloom-laden wings are more important than the direction or speed of its flying. It is always easier for the public to say, how fast, or where it is going than to notice these delicate things. The kinetic speech of a poem is understood by all; the potential depends for its apprehension upon the taste and knowledge of the reader. Words must have for us the associations that they had for the poet. We must be able to see them with his eyes, hear them with his ears, and taste their scents with nostrils not dissimilar to his. In time these things change. Unpopular poetry becomes quite popular, and indeed, no longer poetry, as it loses, through usage or forgetfulness, its proximity to the condition of potential speech. Accents are shifted from one to another syllable, and we should be deaf to the melody if we were unable to replace them. New meanings gather round the words, and they come back from later travels disguised in strange perfumes. The kinetic speech may be disturbed, but the potential has disappeared in a jargon of new sounds, a quarrel of new memories, and a chaos of new odours. Sometimes indeed, it is as if it had never existed.

In this light it is easy to understand the curious business of criticism, and to formulate an account of what occurs when poetry dies, or falls asleep like the princess in the wood, to be awakened after two centuries by a critic’s kiss. The Elizabethan dramatists lost their potential and were judged only by their kinetic speech during the eighteenth century. They were considered coarse and bloody-minded, because there is rapine and murder in their plays. Lamb restored to them the potentiality they had lost and turned bleak rock to flowering country. Spenser had become a mere monger of allegory, until Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt reconstituted him poet by discovering for themselves and others the attitude that restores to his kinetic its lost potential speech. Writers of Wordsworth’s generation realised, at least subconsciously, that a poem is not independent of knowledge. They tried to help us by printing at the head of a poem information about the circumstances of its conception. When a poet tells us that a sonnet was composed “on Westminster Bridge” or “suggested by Mr. Westell’s views of the caves, &c. in Yorkshire,” he is trying to ease for us the task of aesthetic reproduction to which his poem is a stimulus. He is trying to ensure that we shall approach it as he did, and hear as well as the kinetic the potential speech that he values. There is a crudity about such obvious assistance, and it would be quite insufficient without the wider knowledge on which we draw unconsciously as we read. But the crudity of those pitiable scraps of proffered information is not so remarkable as the dulness of perception that can allow a man to demand of a poem that it shall itself compel him accurately to enjoy it. It is possible that much of the old poetry that now seems to us no more than direct speech was once wrapped in a veil of suggestion. It is the critic’s business to rediscover those forgotten veils and to restore to the kinetic the magic of potential speech.

The formula of kinetic and potential speech illumines not only the critic’s business but also that of the historian. It enables him to link together in a single scheme the prose of Goldsmith with that of Pater and the poetry of the eighteenth century with poetry, like that of the Symbolists of the nineteenth, so different as to seem completely unrelated. It enables him to explain a phenomenon that he has usually alluded to as a mere curious accident, the fact that there have been ages when poetry has been popular and others in which it has been the possession of a few. It will, I think, be found that this periodicity coincides with a general variation between kinetic and potential speech. In the eighteenth century, when poetry was often rhymed prose, when the common standard of poetry was good sense, when she gave advice and said things, and did not seem to realise that there were things she could not say, when, in short, the kinetic almost overwhelmed the potential, then poetry was a popular form of literature. In other ages, when poetry has approached the condition of potential speech and so has needed for its appreciation such knowledge as that lately discussed, it has not swelled the publisher’s purse so swiftly as forms of literature that happened to be more nearly kinetic and so more easily enjoyed.