A SCIENTIFIC treatise could, I suppose, be written on how to manipulate vowels and consonants so as to hurry or slow down rhythm, and suggest every different emotion by mere sound sequence but this is for every poet to find out for himself and practise automatically as a painter mixes his paints.
There was once an old Italian portrait painter, who coming to the end of his life, gathered his friends and pupils together and revealed to them a great discovery he had made, as follows:—
“The art of portrait painting consists in putting the High Lights in exactly the right place in the eyes.”
When I come to my death-bed I have a similarly important message to deliver:—
“The art of poetry consists in knowing exactly how to manipulate the letter S.”
XXVIII
ON WRITING MUSICALLY
IN true poetry the mental bracing and relaxing on receipt of sensuous impressions, which we may call the rhythm of emotions, conditions the musical rhythm. This rhythm of emotions also determines the sound-texture of vowels and consonants, so that Metre, as schoolboys understand it when they are made to scan:—Friĕnds, Rōm|ans, count|rymēn, lĕnd mē|your eārs!, has in spontaneous poetry only a submerged existence. For the moment I will content myself by saying that if all words in daily speech were spoken at the same rate, if all stressed syllables and all unstressed syllables, similarly, were dwelt on for exactly the same length of time, as many prosodists assume, poetry would be a much easier art to practise; but it is the haste with which we treat some parts of speech, the deliberation we give to others, and the wide difference in the weight of syllables composed of thin or broad vowels and liquid or rasping consonants, that make it impossible for the Anglo-French theory of only two standardized sound values, long or short, to be reasonably maintained. A far more subtle notation must be adopted, and if it must be shown on a black-board, poetry will appear marked out not in “feet” but in convenient musical bars, with the syllables resolved into quaver, dotted crotchet, semibreve and all the rest of them. Metre in the classical sense of an orderly succession of iambuses, trochees or whatnot, is forced to accept the part of policeman in the Harlequinade, a mere sparring partner for Rhythm the Clown who with his string of sausages is continually tripping him up and beating him over the head, and Texture the Harlequin who steals his truncheon and helmet. This preparatory explanation is necessary because if I were to proclaim in public that “the poet must write musically” it would be understood as an injunction to write like Thomas Moore, or his disciples of today.
XXIX
THE USE OF POETRY
AT this stage the question of the use of poetry to its readers may be considered briefly and without rhapsody. Poetry as the Greeks knew when they adopted the Drama as a cleansing rite of religion, is a form of psycho-therapy. Being the transformation into dream symbolism of some disturbing emotional crisis in the poet’s mind (whether dominated by delight or pain) poetry has the power of homoeopathically healing other men’s minds similarly troubled, by presenting them under the spell of hypnosis with an allegorical solution of the trouble. Once the allegory is recognized by the reader’s unconscious mind as applicable the affective power of his own emotional crisis is diminished. Apparently on a recognition of this aspect of poetry the Greeks founded their splendid emblem of its power—the polished shield of Perseus that mirrored the Gorgon’s head with no hurtful effect and allowed the hero to behead her at his ease. A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure if we are to believe Mr. Housman’s argument in “Terence, this is stupid stuff” no. LXII of his Shropshire Lad.
The musical side of poetry is, properly understood, not merely a hypnotic inducement to the reader to accept suggestions, but a form of psycho-therapy in itself, which, working in conjunction with the pictorial allegory, immensely strengthens its chance of success.