What we have abutted on is not, really, a paradox. The nettle, the sparrow of the world, is its rose, its nightingale. Again, why not?—he has been, and may be again. The point is that, in life as the English practise it, one passes into the other imperceptibly. For other peoples, poetry has been a thing removed from truth and fact, treating of shadowy or unearthly beauties in an atmosphere no human being ever breathed. That has never been the prevailing English view. For them the poet’s task has been the practical one of making language live, casting on one side the intellectual figments and abstractions in which speech entangles us and bringing back to words their primal power and motion. Poetry is often called simple, but the word needs a gloss. Simple people have poetry because they are so near nature and speak so little that their speech is like an animal’s cry, half its own, half an echo of its surroundings. As the complexities of civilization pass over them, they become complex, they ‘grow up’, and because they are grown up, we think them more mature. They are not really more mature: they are more mechanical. So far as by growth we become complex, we are growing towards a condition in which growth is stultified. The mature is that of which the elements are indistinguishably fused together, it is simplicity at a higher power. This is the simplicity of poetry, which outreaches the finest minds in their subtlest discriminations and abashes science with the flames of its enveloping beauty. This, too, is the simplicity of the English nature, and the English language; neither of them, obviously, simple things at all, but possessed, it seems, of Nature’s secret of growth and therefore destined, we may believe, to go on growing.
It was right that an essay on the future of English should contain very little about English itself. To test the mirror, watch what it reflects. The less we think about our language, the likelier we are to retain the qualities which have made it what it is; the more we study it, the greater the risk of breaking that continuous impulse with which the English mind, in high and low alike, feels its way through the world, watching without defining, absorbing rather than classifying, identified with the meanings of things, not distinguished from them. For its loyal use and a true maintenance of the virtue of its tradition we have only to assume that it was made for our purposes by others whose purposes were the same as ours, and to see that it lives to-day on our lips as it lived once on theirs. “Ripeness is all.”
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.