Since the Platonic philosopher and the practical man stand for antipodal conceptions of reality, it really seems too bad that Plato will not give the poet credit for a little merit, in comparison with his arch-enemy. But as a matter of fact, the spectator of eternity and the sense-blinded man of the street form a grotesque fraternity, for the nonce, and the philosopher assures the plain man that he is far more to his liking than is the poet. Plato's reasoning is, of course, that the plain man at least does not tamper with the objects of sense, through which the philosopher may discern gleams of the spiritual world, whereas the poet distorts them till their real significance is obscured. The poet pretends that he is giving their real meaning, even as the philosopher, but his interpretation is false. He is like a man who, by an ingenious system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body.
Will not Plato's accusation of the poet's inferiority to the practical man be made clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of the three beds? One, he says, is made by God, one by the carpenter, and one by the poet. [Footnote: See the Republic X, 596 B ff.] Now the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well known. It speaks, in "ponderous bass," to the other furniture in the room:
"I know what is and what has been;
Not anything to me comes strange,
Who in so many years have seen
And lived through every kind of change.
I know when men are bad or good,
When well or ill," he slowly said,
"When sad or glad, when sane or mad
And when they sleep alive or dead."
[Footnote: In the Room]
Plato would say of this majestic four-poster, with its multifarious memories "of births and deaths and marriage nights," that it does not come so near the essential idea of bedness as does the most non-descript product of the carpenters' tools. James Thomson's poem, he would say, is on precisely the same plane as the reflection of one's bed in the mirror across the room. Therefore he inquires, "Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing higher in him? … Imitation is only a kind of play or sport." [Footnote: Republic X, 599 A.]
It has long been the fashion for those who care for poetry to shake their heads over Plato's aberration at this point. It seems absurd enough to us to hear the utility of a thing determined by its number of dimensions. What virtue is there in merely filling space? We all feel the fallacy in such an adaptation of Plato's argument as Longfellow assigns to Michael Angelo, causing that versatile artist to conclude:
Painting and sculpture are but images;
Are merely shadows cast by outward things
On stone or canvas, having in themselves
No separate existence. Architecture,
As something in itself, and not an image,
A something that is not, surpasses them
As substance shadow.
[Footnote: Michael Angelo.]
Yet it may be that the homeliness of Plato's illustration has misled us as to the seriousness of the problem. Let us forget about beds and buildings and think of actual life in the more dignified way that has become habitual to us since the war. Then it must appear that Plato's charge is as truly a live issue here and now as it ever was in Athens. The claims for the supremacy of poetry, set forth by Aristotle, Sidney and the rest, seem to weaken, for the time being, at least, when we find that in our day the judgment that poetry is inferior to life comes, not from outsiders, but from men who were at one time most ardent votaries of the muse. Repudiation by verse-writers of poetry's highest claims we have been accustomed to dismiss, until recently, as betrayal of a streak of commonness in the speaker's nature,—of a disposition to value the clay of life more highly than the fire. We were not, perhaps, inclined to take even so great a poet as Byron very seriously when he declared, "I by no means rank poets or poetry high in the scale of the intellect. It is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake. I prefer the talents of action." But with the outbreak of the world war one met unquestionably sincere confession from more than one poet that he found verse-writing a pale and anemic thing. Thus "A. E." regretted the time that he spent on poetry, sighing,
He who might have wrought in flame
Only traced upon the foam.
[Footnote: Epilogue]
In the same spirit are Joyce Kilmer's words, written shortly before his death in the trenches: "I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory." [Footnote: Letter, May 7, 1918. See Joyce Kilmer's works, edited by Richard Le Gallienne.] Also we have the decision of Francis Ledwidge, another poet who died a soldier:
A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart,
Are greater than a poet's art,
And greater than a poet's fame
A little grave that has no name.
[Footnote: Soliloquy.]