Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale, not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
[Footnote: Prologue to the Earthly Paradise.]
Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein, Preludes.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of man." [Footnote: Sleep and Poetry.]
We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to suicide. Poetry may be comforting without being illusive. Emerson says,
'Tis the privilege of art
Thus to play its cheerful part
Man on earth to acclimate
And bend the exile to his fate.
[Footnote: Art.]
It is not, obviously, Emerson's conception that the poetry which brings this about falsifies. Like most poets, he indicates that art accomplishes its end, not merely by obscuring the hideous accidents of life, but by enabling us to glimpse an ideal element which abides in it, and is its essence.
Is the essence of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so constitutionally Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly Aristotelians. Plato seems to say that ideality is not, as a matter of fact, the essence of objects. It is a light reflected upon them, as the sun's light is reflected upon the moon. So he claims that the artist who portrays life is like one who, drawing a picture of the moon, gives usonly a map of her craters, and misses entirely the only thing that gives the moon any meaning, that is, moonlight. But the poet, that lover of the sensuous, cannot quite accept such a view as this. Ideality is truly the essence of objects, he avers, though it is overlaid with a mass of meaningless material. Hence the poet who gives us a representation of things is not obscuring them, but is doing us a service by simplifying them, and so making their ideality clearer. All that the most idealistic poet need do is to imitate; as Mrs. Browning says,
Paint a body well,
You paint a soul by implication.
[Footnote: Aurora Leigh.]
This firm faith that the sensual is the dwelling-place of the spiritual accounts for the poet's impatience with the contention that his art is useless unless he points a lesson, by manipulating his materials toward a conscious moral end. The poet refuses to turn objects this way and that, until they catch a reflection from a separate moral world. If he tries to write with two distinct purposes, hoping to "suffice the eye and save the soul beside," [Footnote: The Ring and the Book.] as Browning puts it, he is apt to hide the intrinsic spirituality of things under a cloak of ready-made moral conceptions. In his moments of deepest insight the poet is sure that his one duty is to reveal beauty clearly, without troubling himself about moralizing, and he assures his readers,
If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents.
[Footnote: Fra, Lippo Lippi.]
Probably poets have always felt, in their hearts, what the radicals of the present day are saying so vehemently, that the poet should not be expected to sermonize: "I wish to state my firm belief," says Amy Lowell, "that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is created beauty." [Footnote: Preface to Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. See also Joyce Kilmer, Letter to Howard W. Cook, June 28, 1918.]