With time across a continent.”
What are the sources of the interesting in life? Novelty is one, but it is short-lived; beauty and sublimity are others, and are more lasting. But the main source of the interesting is human association. The landscape that is written over with human history, how it holds us and draws us! All phases of modern industrial life—the miner, the lumberman, the road-builder, the engineer, the factory-hand, are available for poetic treatment to him who can bring the proper fund of human association, who can make the human element in these things paramount over the mechanical element. The more of nature you get in, the more the picture has a background of earth and sky, or of great human passions and heroisms, the more the imagination is warmed and moved. The railroad is itself a blotch upon the earth, but it has a mighty background. In itself it is at war with every feature of the landscape it passes through; it stains the snows, it befouls the water, it poisons the air, it smuts the grass and the foliage, it expels the peace and the quiet, it puts to rout every rural divinity. It adapts itself to nothing; it is as arbitrary as a cyclone and as killing as a pestilence. Yet a train of cars thundering through storm and darkness, racing with winds and clouds, is a sublime object to contemplate; it is sublime because of its triumph over time and space, and because of the danger and dread that compass it about. It has a tremendous human background. The body-killing and soul-blighting occupations peculiar to our civilization are not of themselves suggestive of poetic thoughts; but if Dante made poetry out of hell, would not a nature copious and powerful enough make poetry out of the vast and varied elements of our materialistic civilization?
VIII
POETRY AND ELOQUENCE
WHERE does eloquence end, where does poetry begin?” inquires Renan in his “Future of Science.” And he goes on to say, “The whole difference lies in a peculiar harmony, in a more or less sonorous ring, with regard to which an experienced faculty never hesitates.”
Is not the “sonorous ring,” however, more characteristic of eloquence than of poetry? Poetry does begin where eloquence ends; it is a higher and finer harmony. Nearly all men feel the power of eloquence, but poetry does not sway the multitude; it does not sway at all,—it lifts, and illuminates, and soothes. It reaches the spirit, while eloquence stops with the reason and the emotions.
Eloquence is much the more palpable, real, available; it is a wind that fills every sail and makes every mast bend, while poetry is a breeze touched with a wild perfume from field or wood. Poetry is consistent with perfect tranquillity of spirit; a true poem may have the calm of a summer day, the placidity of a mountain lake, but eloquence is a torrent, a tempest, mass in motion, an army with banners, the burst of a hundred instruments of music. Tennyson’s “Maud” is a notable blending of the two.
There is something martial in eloquence, the roll of the drum, the cry of the fife, the wheel and flash of serried ranks. Its end is action; it shapes events, it takes captive the reason and the understanding. Its basis is earnestness, vehemence, depth of conviction.
There is no eloquence without heat, and no poetry without light. An earnest man is more or less an eloquent man. Eloquence belongs to the world of actual affairs and events; it is aroused by great wrongs and great dangers, it flourishes in the forum and the senate. Poetry is more private and personal, is more for the soul and the religious instincts; it courts solitude and wooes the ideal.
Anything swiftly told or described, the sense of speed and volume, is, or approaches, eloquence; while anything heightened and deepened, any meaning and beauty suddenly revealed, is, or approaches, poetry. Hume says of the eloquence of Demosthenes, “It is rapid harmony, exactly adjusted to the sense. It is vehement reasoning without any appearance of art; it is disdain, anger, boldness, freedom, involved in a continual stream of argument.”