The swan existing
Is like a song with an accompaniment
Imaginary.
Across the grassy lake,
Across the lake to the shadow of the willows
It is accompanied by an image,
—as by Debussy's
"Réflets dans l'eau."
The swan that is
Reflects
Upon the solitary water—breast to breast
With the duplicity:
"The other one!"
And breast to breast it is confused.
O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession!
It is accompanied by the image of itself
Alone.
At night
The lake is a wide silence,
Without imagination.
But why should poets assume, someone may object, that this mystic answering of sense to spirit and of spirit to sense is to be discovered by the imagination of none but poets? All men are made up of flesh and spirit; do not the desires of all men, accordingly, point to the spiritual and to the physical, exactly as do the poet's? In a sense; yes; but on the other hand all men but the poet have an aim that is clearly either physical or spiritual; therefore they do not stand poised between the two worlds with the perfect balance of interests which marks the poet. The philosopher and the man of religion recognize their goal as a spiritual and ascetic one. If they concern themselves more than is needful with the temporal and sensual, they feel that they are false to their ideal. The scientist and the man of affairs, on the other hand, are concerned with the physical; therefore most of the time they dismiss consideration of the spiritual as being outside of their province. Of course many persons would disagree with this last statement. The genius of an Edison, they assert, is precisely like the genius of a poet. But if this were true, we should be moved by the mechanism of a phonograph just as we are moved by a poem, and we are not. We may be amazed by the invention, and still find our thoughts tied to the physical world. It is not the instrument, but the voice of an artist added to it that makes us conscious of the two worlds of sense and spirit, reflecting one another.
Supposing that all this is true, what is gained by discovering, from a consensus of poets' views, that the distinctive characteristic of the poet is harmony of sense and spirit? Is not this so obvious as to be a truism? It is perhaps so obvious that like all the truest things in the world it is likely to be ignored unless insisted upon occasionally. Certainly it has been ignored too frequently in the history of English criticism. Whenever men of simpler aims than the poet have written criticism, they have misread the issue in various ways, and have usually ended by condemning the poet in so far as he diverged from their own goal.
It is obvious that the moral obsession which has twisted so much of English criticism is the result of a failure to grasp the real nature of the poet's vitality. Criticism arose, with Gosson's School of Abuse, as an attack upon the ethics of the poet by the puritan, who had cut himself off from the joys of sense. Because champions of poetry were concerned with answering this attack, the bulk of Elizabethan criticism, that of Lodge, [Footnote: Defense of Poetry, Musick and Stage Plays.] Harrington, [Footnote: Apology for Poetry.] Meres, [Footnote: Palladis Tamia.] Campion, [Footnote: Observations in the Art of English Poetry.] Daniel, [Footnote: Defense of Rhyme.] and even in lesser degree of Sidney, obscures the aesthetic problem by turning it into an ethical one.
In the criticism of Sidney, himself a poet, one does find implied a recognition of the twofold significance of the poet's powers. He asserts his spiritual pre-eminence strongly, declaring that the poet, unlike the scientist, is not bound to the physical world.[Footnote: "He is not bound to any such subjection, as scientists, to nature." Defense of Poetry.] On the other hand he is clearly aware of the need for a sensuous element in poetry, since by it, Sidney declares, the poet may lead men by "delight" to follow the forms of virtue.
The next critic of note, Dryden, in his revulsion from the ascetic character which the puritans would develop in the poet, swung too far to the other extreme, and threw the poetic character out of balance by belittling its spiritual insight. He did justice to the physical element in poetry, defining poetic drama, the type of his immediate concern, as "a just and lively image of human nature, in its actions, passions, and traverses of fortune," [Footnote: English Garner, III, 513.] but he appears to have felt the ideal aspect of the poet's nature as merely a negation of the sensual, so that he was driven to the absurdity of recommending a purely mechanical device, rhyme, as a means of elevating poetry above the sordid plane of "a bare imitation." In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke likewise laid too much stress upon the physical aspect of the poet's nature, in accounting for the sublime in poetry as originating in the sense of pain, and the beautiful as originating in pleasure. Yet he comes closer than most critics to laying his finger onthe particular point which distinguishes poets from philosophers, namely, their dependence upon sensation.