Thanks are due to the editor of The Egoist, London, for permission to reprint The Ghosts of an Old House and the Orange Symphony; to the editor of Poetry, Chicago, for permission to reprint the Blue Symphony; and to the editor of The Little Review for permission to reprint the Green Symphony.
PREFACE
I
The second half of the nineteenth and the first fifteen years of the twentieth century have been a period of research, of experiment, of unrest and questioning. In science and philosophy we have witnessed an attempt to destroy the mechanistic theory of the universe as developed by Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The unknowable has been questioned: hypotheses have been shaken: vitalism and idealism have been proclaimed. In the arts, the tendency has been to strip each art of its inessentials and to disclose the underlying basis of pure form. In life, the principles of nationality, of racial culture, of individualism, of social development, of Christian ethics, have been discussed, debated, and examined from top to bottom, until at last, in the early years of the twentieth century we find all Europe, from the leaders of thought down to the lowest peasantry, engaged in a mutually destructive war of which few can trace the beginnings and none can foresee the end. The fundamental tenets of thought, art, life itself, have been shaken: and either civilization is destined to some new birth, or mankind will revert to the conditions of life, thought, and social intercourse that prevailed in the Stone Age.
Like all men of my generation, I have not been able to resist this irresistible upheaval of ideas and of forces: and, to the best of my ability, I have tried to arrive at a clear understanding of the fundamentals of æsthetic form as they affect the art to which I have felt myself instinctively akin, the art of poetry. That I have completely attained such an understanding, it would be idle for me to pretend: but I believe, and have induced some others to believe, that I have made a few steps towards it. Some explanation of my own peculiar theories and beliefs is necessary, however, to those who have not specifically concerned themselves with poetry, or who suffer in the presence of any new work of art from the normal human reaction that all art principles are so essentially fixed that any departure from accepted ideas is madness.
II
The fundamental basis of all the arts is the same. In every case art aims at the evocation of some human emotion in the spectator or listener. Where science proceeds from effects to causes, and seeks to analyze the underlying causes of emotion and sensation, art reverses the process, and constructs something that will awaken emotions, according to the amount of receptiveness with which other people approach it. Thus architecture gives us feelings of density, proportion, harmony: sculpture, of masses in movement; painting, of colour-harmony and the ordered composition of lines and volumes from which arise sensations of space: music, of the development of sounds into melodic line, harmonic progression, tonal opposition, and symphonic structure.