Kenelm Chillingly — Complete

by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton

“I doubt that,” said the minstrel. “Song, at the best, is but the echo of some voice from the heart of Nature. And if the cuckoo’s note seemed to you such a voice, it was an answer to your questionings perhaps more simply truthful than man can utter, if you had rightly construed the language.”

“My good friend,” answered Kenelm, “what you say sounds very prettily; and it contains a sentiment which has been amplified by certain critics into that measureless domain of dunderheads which is vulgarly called BOSH. But though Nature is never silent, though she abuses the privilege of her age in being tediously gossiping and garrulous, Nature never replies to our questions: she can’t understand an argument; she has never read Mr. Mill’s work on Logic. In fact, as it is truly said by a great philosopher, ‘Nature has no mind.’ Every man who addresses her is compelled to force upon her for a moment the loan of his own mind. And if she answers a question which his own mind puts to her, it is only by such a reply as his own mind teaches to her parrot-like lips. And as every man has a different mind, so every man gets a different answer. Nature is a lying old humbug.”

The minstrel laughed merrily; and his laugh was as sweet as his chant.

“Poets would have a great deal to unlearn if they are to look upon Nature in that light.”

“Bad poets would, and so much the better for them and their readers.”

“Are not good poets students of Nature?”

“Students of Nature, certainly, as surgeons study anatomy by dissecting a dead body. But the good poet, like the good surgeon, is the man who considers that study merely as the necessary A B C, and not as the all-in-all essential to skill in his practice. I do not give the fame of a good surgeon to a man who fills a book with details, more or less accurate, of fibres and nerves and muscles; and I don’t give the fame of a good poet to a man who makes an inventory of the Rhine or the Vale of Gloucester. The good surgeon and the good poet are they who understand the living man. What is that poetry of drama which Aristotle justly ranks as the highest? Is it not a poetry in which description of inanimate Nature must of necessity be very brief and general; in which even the external form of man is so indifferent a consideration that it will vary with each actor who performs the part? A Hamlet may be fair or dark. A Macbeth may be short or tall. The merit of dramatic poetry consists in the substituting for what is commonly called Nature (namely, external and material Nature) creatures intellectual, emotional, but so purely immaterial that they may be said to be all mind and soul, accepting the temporary loans of any such bodies at hand as actors may offer, in order to be made palpable and visible to the audience, but needing no such bodies to be palpable and visible to readers. The highest kind of poetry is therefore that which has least to do with external Nature. But every grade has its merit more or less genuinely great, according as it instils into Nature that which is not there,—the reason and the soul of man.”

“I am not much disposed,” said the minstrel, “to acknowledge any one form of poetry to be practically higher than another; that is, so far as to elevate the poet who cultivates what you call the highest with some success above the rank of the poet who cultivates what you call a very inferior school with a success much more triumphant. In theory, dramatic poetry may be higher than lyric, and ‘Venice Preserved’ is a very successful drama; but I think Burns a greater poet than Otway.”

“Possibly he may be; but I know of no lyrical poet, at least among the moderns, who treats less of Nature as the mere outward form of things, or more passionately animates her framework with his own human heart, than does Robert Burns. Do you suppose when a Greek, in some perplexity of reason or conscience, addressed a question to the oracular oak-leaves of Dodona that the oak-leaves answered him? Don’t you rather believe that the question suggested by his mind was answered by the mind of his fellow-man, the priest, who made the oak-leaves the mere vehicle of communication, as you and I might make such vehicle in a sheet of writing-paper? Is not the history of superstition a chronicle of the follies of man in attempting to get answers from external Nature?”

“But,” said the minstrel, “have I not somewhere heard or read that the experiments of Science are the answers made by Nature to the questions put to her by man?”