THE
POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.
CHAPTER I.
THE SOURCES OF POETRY.
Poetry, we are often told, has two great objects with which it deals, two substances out of which alone it weaves its many-colored fabric—Man and Nature. Yet such a statement seems hardly adequate. For is there not in all high Poetry, whether it deals with Nature or with Man, continual reference, now latent, now expressed, to something which is beyond and above both? This reference has taken many shapes, and uttered itself in many ways, according to the belief and civilization of each age and country. But by whatever mists and obstructions it has been colored and refracted, it has never been wholly absent from true Poetry, and has been working itself clearer, and making itself more powerfully felt, as the world grows older. The Higher Life encompassing the life both of Man and of Nature; the deeper Foundation on which both ultimately repose; the omnipresent Power which binds both together, and makes them work in unison toward some further end,—this has been a truth ever present in the highest Poetry, to which great Poets have always witnessed. Therefore, even in the most summary view of the domain of Poetry, we must not omit this invisible but most powerful element. To express it clearly, we must say that Poetry has three objects, which in varying degrees enter into it,—Man, Nature, and God. The presence of this last pervades all great Poetry, whether it lifts an eye of reverence directly towards Himself, or whether the presence be only indirectly felt, as the centre to which all deep thoughts about Man and Nature ultimately tend. Regarded in this view, the field over which Poetry ranges becomes coextensive with the domain of Philosophy, and indeed of Theology. Dissimilar, often opposed, as is the procedure of Poetry, of Philosophy, and of Theology, different as are the faculties which each calls into play, and the mode in which these faculties deal with their objects, yet the hinges on which all alike turn, the cardinal conceptions on which their eye is fixed, are fundamentally the same. While Philosophy and Theology, in their striving to attain distinct conceptions, are forced to deal with these great ideas separately, and to keep them systematically apart, Poetry, on the other hand, under the fusing and blending power of imagination, is, in its highest mood, pervaded by a continual reference to all the three at once, and will at times combine and flash them all at once upon the soul in one inspired line.
It is, however, of only one of these three main objects of Poetry that I now propose to treat—the action of Poetry on external Nature, the way in which the poets deal with the outward world. In doing this it will appear at a glance, and will become more clear in the sequel, that it is impossible to isolate this one aspect of Poetry; that, even when the poet’s regards are mainly turned toward the outward world, the sense of God and of man is not far away. But even when we do our best to limit the subject as far as may be, it is so vast in itself and in its ramifications, that, far from hoping to exhaust it in these few pages, I shall be well content if, when they are finished, it is found that a few avenues of thought have been opened up, a few glimpses obtained into truths which are real and suggestive.
Before going farther, let me say what I mean by Nature, for there is no word which more needs definition. There is none, except perhaps its counterpart, Reason, which is used in more various, often conflicting, meanings, or with more shades of meaning, each passing into the other. By Nature, then, I understand the whole sum of appearances which reach us, which are made known to us, primarily through the senses. It includes all the intimations we have through sense of that great entity which lies outside of ourselves, but with which we have so much to do. For my present purpose I do not include Man, either his body or his mind, as part of Nature, but regard him rather as standing out from Nature, and surveying and using that great external entity which encompasses and confronts him at every turn, he being the contemplator, Nature the thing contemplated.
The same external Nature which Poetry works on supplies the staple or raw material with which all the Physical Sciences deal, and which they endeavor to reduce to exact knowledge, subduing apparent confusion and multiplicity into unity, law, and order. Each of the Physical Sciences attempts to explain the outward world in one of its aspects, to interpret it from one point of view. And the whole circle of the Physical Sciences, or Physical Science in its widest extent, confines itself to explaining the appearances of the material world by the properties of matter, and to reducing what is complex and manifold to the operation of a few simple but all-pervading laws. But besides those aspects of Nature which Physical Science explains, over and above those laws which the Sciences discover, there are other sides or aspects of Nature which come to us through other than scientific avenues, and which, when they do reach us, bring home to us new truth, and raise us to noble contemplations. This ordered array of material appearances, these marshaled lines of Nature’s sequences, wonderful and beautiful though they be, are not in themselves all. No reasonable being can rest in them. Inevitably he is carried out of and beyond these, to other inquiries which no Physics can answer: How stand these phenomena to the thinking mind and feeling heart which contemplates them? how came they to be as they are? are they there of themselves, or is there a Higher Centre from which they proceed? what is their origin? what the goal toward which they travel? Inquiries such as these, which are the genuine product of Reason, lead us for their answer, not to the Physics of the Universe, but to another order of thought, to Poetry, to Philosophy, and to Theology. And the light thrown from these regions on this marvelous outward framework, while it contradicts nothing in the body of truth which Science has made good, permeates the whole with a higher meaning, and transfigures it with a splendor which is Divine.
Philosophy and Theology we must for the present leave alone, and ask only what is that aspect of Nature, that truth of the External World, with which Poetry has more immediately to do. To put it in the simplest way: it is Beauty, that strange and wonderful entity with which all creation is clothed as with a garment, or rather I should say pervaded and penetrated as by a subtle essence, inwrought into its inmost fibre. The Poet is the man to whom is given the eye that sees this more instinctively, the heart that feels it more intensely, than other men do; and who has the power to express it and bring it home to his fellow-men. But if I were to confine myself to this I should not be saying much. For the question would at once be asked, “Pray, what is Beauty?” And it might be further asked, “Is it not as much the business of the Painter as of the Poet to seize and express the visible beauty of which you speak?”
Any attempt to answer the first question, and to explain what is Beauty, would involve a long discussion, perhaps not a very profitable one. At any rate it would lead me far from my present purpose. This only may be said in passing. Light, as physicists inform us, is not something which exists in itself apart from any sentient being. The external reality is not light, but the motion of certain particles, which, when they impinge on the eye, and have been conveyed along the visual nerve to the brain, are felt by the mind as light,—result in the perception of light. Light, therefore, is not a purely objective thing, but is something produced by the meeting of certain outward motions with a perceiving mind. Again, certain vibrations of the air striking on the drum of the ear, and communicated by the nerve of hearing to the brain, result in the perception of sound. Sound, therefore, is not a purely objective entity, but is a result that requires to its production the meeting of an outward vibration with a hearing mind; it is the result of the joint action of these two elements. In a similar way, certain qualities of outward objects, certain combinations of laws in the material world, when apprehended by the soul through its æsthetic and imaginative faculties, result in the perception of what we call Beauty. Therefore Beauty, neither wholly without us nor wholly within us, is a product resulting from the meeting of certain qualities of the outward world with a sensitive and imaginative soul. The combination of both of these elements is requisite to its existence. It is no merely mental or subjective thing, born of association, and depending on individual caprice, as the Scotch philosophers so long fancied. When the two elements necessary to the perception of it have met, it is a reality as inevitable and as veritable as the law of gravitation, or any law which science registers. And when, either through our own perception, or through the teaching of the poets, we learn to apprehend it—when it has found entrance into us, through eye and ear, imagination and emotion, we have learnt something more about the world in which we dwell than Physics have taught us,—a new truth of the material universe has reached us through the imagination, not through the scientific or logical faculty.
If, then, Beauty be a real quality interwoven into the essential texture of Creation, and if Poetry be the fittest human expression of the existence of this quality, it follows that Poetry has to do with truth as really as Science has, though with a different order of truth. This is perhaps not the common view of the matter. An old Scotch gentleman I once knew, one of the most sagacious and wise of his generation, who, whenever anything was propounded which was more than usually extravagant and absurd, used to dismiss it with a wave of his hand, saying: “Oh, that is Poetry.” Yet he was one who could see in the outlines of his native hills, and feel in all human relations, whatever was most beautiful. There are, I dare say, a good many sensible people who share my friend’s view, to whom Poetry is only another name for what is fanciful, fantastic, unreal—only, as one called it, a convenient way of talking nonsense. To these I would say, If this be so, if Poetry be not true, if it have not a real foundation in the nature of things, if genuine Poetry be not as true a form of thinking as any other, indeed one of the highest forms of human thought, then I should not recommend any one to waste time on it, but to have done with it, and turn to more solid pursuits. It is because I have a quite opposite conviction, because I believe Poetry to have a true and noble place in this order of things, a place not made by the conceit of man, but intended by the Maker of this order, because I hold Poetry to be, what Wordsworth has called it, “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”—to be “immortal as the heart of man,” it is because of these convictions that there is claimed for it the serious regard of reasonable men, and that it seems worth our while to dwell for a little on one, though only one, aspect of this many-sided study.
The real nature and intrinsic truth of Poetry will be made more apparent, if we may turn aside for a moment to reflect on the essence of that state of mind which we call the poetic, the genesis of that creation which we call Poetry. Whenever any object of sense, or spectacle of the outer world, any truth of reason, or event of past history, any fact of human experience, any moral or spiritual reality; whenever, in short, any fact or object which the sense, or the intellect, or the soul, or the spirit of man can apprehend, comes home to one so as to touch him to the quick, to pierce him with a more than usual vividness and sense of reality, then is awakened that stirring of the imagination, that glow of emotion, in which Poetry is born. There is no truth cognizable by man which may not shape itself into Poetry. It matters not whether it be a vision of Nature’s ongoings, or a conception of the understanding, or some human incident, or some truth of the affections, or some moral sentiment, or some glimpse into the spiritual world; any one of these may be so realized as to become fit subjects for poetic utterance. Only in order that it should be so, it is necessary that the object, whatever it is, should cease to be a merely sensible object, or a mere notion of the understanding, and pass inward,—pass out of the coldness of the merely notional region into the warm atmosphere of the life-giving Imagination. Vitalized there, the truth shapes itself into living images which kindle the passion and affections, and stimulate the whole man. This is what has been called the real apprehension of truths, as opposed to the merely notional assent to them. There is no quality in which men more differ than in this intensity of mental nature, this power of vividly realizing whatever a man does lay hold of. It is an essential—indeed a primary—ingredient in the composition of the Poet; but is not confined to him. It is shared by all men who are powerful in any line of thought or action. This mental energy, this intensity of realizing power, is the stuff out of which are made all who in any way really move their fellow-men. It creates, as has been well said, “Heroes and saints, great leaders, statesmen, preachers, and reformers, the pioneers of discovery in science, visionaries, fanatics, knight-errants, and adventurers.” In these and such like, the men of abounding energy, who have revolutionized states and moved the world, the process had begun with the vivid realization of some truth through the imagination; but it has not stopped there. It has gone on from the imagination to the affections. It has stirred the hopes, the fears, the loves, the hates of the soul, enkindling them and driving them with full force on the will, and propelling the man into action. In the Poet, on the other hand, the process not only begins, but continues in the imagination, kindling, no doubt, a real glow of emotion, but not leading him, as poet, to any outward action, save the one action of giving vent to what he feels, of finding poetic expression for the vision with which his imagination is filled.