Platform Monologues Part 12

It is true that Keats, in a moment of that petulance which is one of his less happy characteristics, writes like this:--

Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven; We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine, Unweave a rainbow.

But a.s.suredly it was in his haste that Keats let slip those lines. To him at least, loving as he did the "principle of beauty in all things,"

to him, to whom a "thing of beauty is a joy for ever," the rainbow was not given in the dull catalogue of common things. Nor is it to us, though we might render ever so scientifically accurate an account of the origin of rainbows.

Sh.e.l.ley, who had dabbled in chemistry for the love of science, knew, as well as we know, that a cloud is but moisture evaporated from the earth, that there is no Valkyrie in it. But that does not hinder him from making such a cloud a thing of life, and causing it to sing--

I wield the flail of the las.h.i.+ng hail And whiten the green plains under; And then again I dissolve it in rain And laugh as I pa.s.s in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast.

Neither his studies in natural science, nor his economic and moral readings in G.o.dwin and Condorcet could repress, or even tended to repress, the flight of Sh.e.l.ley's imagination. Nor did Goethe's original and almost professional scientific work in botany, anatomy, and optics prevent the creation of his _Faust_ or the singing of his touching ballads. And when we question the compatibility of historical knowledge with the poetry of epic or romantic creations, do we suppose that Tennyson, while writing the _Idylls of the King_, believed in the stories of Arthur, of Lancelot, of Galahad, or of the Holy Grail? When Morris composed the _Earthly Paradise_, had his imagination no freedom of flight because stubborn facts of history and geography clipped its pinions?

The truth is that there are two ways of looking at existing things, two ways of handling them; and neither way is false. The scientist's way we all understand. It is the way of the microscope and the crucible. It arrives at definite physical facts. It sets forth the material const.i.tution and physical laws of objects. But to the poet, says Mrs.

Browning--

Every natural flower which grows on earth Implies a flower on the spiritual side.

And what is true of flowers is true of suns and stars and living creatures and all that science contemplates. Science is knowledge, while poetry, a.s.serts Wordsworth, is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge"; it is "the impa.s.sioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." There is a poetic truth, and there is a scientific truth, compatible one with the other, complementary one to the other. Perhaps the most prosaic mind that ever existed was that of Jeremy Bentham, and "poetry," said that worthy, "is misrepresentation."

One may be pardoned for a pa.s.sing impatience when the poetical side of man is treated as a kind of amiable delusion; when one hears the shallow argument, containing a begged question, that, inasmuch as the poet imagines in things what is really not there at all, he is so far a wanderer from the truth and an enemy of science. The answer is very brief; the poet does not imagine something which is not there. A beauty or a suggestion is a truth, and the poet sees a beauty or a suggestion.

He would indeed be false and an enemy to science if he said that a primrose by the river's brim was a b.u.t.tercup, or that it was red when it is yellow, but it is no fiction when he declares that the primrose tells him this or that of nature or of G.o.d. It may not tell the scientist anything of the kind, but that is because the scientist does not look for such a thing in it, does not understand or seek to understand its language. "The eye of the intellect," says Carlyle, "sees in all objects what it brings with it the means of seeing." Say, if you like, that it is really the poet himself who puts the language, the message, into flower or tree or waterfall. That only removes the argument a step further back. How is he prompted to find such language there?

And who knows but that, by his exquisite sensibility and gift of sympathy, the poet may be discovering truths more valuable to us in the end than all the truths of science? The Newtons and Faradays and Lyells perform their several tasks in the region of great literal physical facts and laws; the Shakespeares and Wordsworths and Sh.e.l.leys perform theirs in the region of things ideal, in the expression of potent suggestions and stimulations. We cannot afford to treat as weak fantastic enthusiasts those to whom

The meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Nor can we too soon recognize the fact that what the world requires is the combined result of both forms of genius. It requires that the genius of science and the genius of poetry should unite their powers and their discoveries into one grand harmony of happiness in faith and hope and love.

One can do no better than quote from Wordsworth a pa.s.sage which shows how the moral mood is transformed through the medium of the eye, when the eye gazes with poetic sympathy on nature:--

O then what soul was his, when on the top Of the high mountains he beheld the sun Rise up and bathe the world in light! He looked-- Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth, And ocean's liquid ma.s.s, beneath him lay In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched, And in their silent faces did he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none Nor any voice of joy. His spirit drank The spectacle; sensation, soul and form All melted into him; they swallowed up His animal being; in them did he live, And by them did he live; they were his life.

There are people who find little satisfaction in Wordsworth. His reputation is a puzzle to them. They look for fine pa.s.sages and too rarely discover them. They judge him by the test of mere brilliance of language, not by the higher and truer poetic gift, the power of seeing "into the life of things," the power and exquisite feeling whereby outward facts are brought to serve as inward forces.

And, quite apart from this function as the receiver of impressions and the communicator of them; quite apart from the function of the poet as moral and spiritual teacher working side by side with that teacher of facts, the man of science, there is room, and will always be room, for the artist-poet who simply refreshes and entertains. For poetry lies also in epics and romances, in "feigned history" and descriptions, when the poet, as Longinus says, "by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul," makes it seem to us that we behold those things which he paints--a feat which he performs through his gift of imagination, whereby he bodies forth the shapes of things unknown and gives to airy nothings of beauty and delight and pathos a local habitation and a name. The world of the future will find refreshment in such creations no less than the world of the present. We know that romantic novels are unreal, but we read them with keen enjoyment none the less. So those romantic poems the _Idylls of the King_ and _The Earthly Paradise_, like _The Tempest_, or the _Faerie Queene_, though they cause us no real illusion as to fact, nevertheless absorb our interest, and charm us with their unliteral beauties. We know in our hearts that there is no magic and no fairyland. But it is a pitiably dull and mollusc mind which finds no delight in peering through those

Charm'd magic cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

There remains, then, this function too of the poet who gives "exquisite expression" to an "exquisite impression"--the function of entertaining us n.o.bly with tender thought and touching story, embodied in words of beauty, and graced with melodious cadences. Of such sort is the writer of the _Earthly Paradise_, who confesses his own modest aims in words like these:--

Of heaven or h.e.l.l I have no power to sing; I cannot ease the burden of your fears, Or make quick-coming death a little thing, Or bring again the pleasure of past years, Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears, Or hope again for aught that I can say, The idle singer of an empty day.

But rather, when aweary of your mirth, From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh, And, feeling kindly unto all the earth, Grudge every minute as it pa.s.ses by, Made the more mindful that the sweet days die, Remember me a little then, I pray, The idle singer of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme Beat with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

We have dealt with the poet's place in the world of growing scientific light. We might also treat of the poet's place in the world of social progress. But he is a bold man who will prophesy whither society is tending. To some of us, its evolution has no terrors. But, whatever be the course of inst.i.tutions, whatever the changing shapes of the social organism, there is one conviction we may most firmly hold. It is that, as ecstasies of love and grief, hope and fear, joy and suffering, must still exist, so the poet will ever exist to give them utterance. The drama, the lyric, the elegy, can never be effete so long as men have hearts and feel with them.

But why, it may be asked, should all this exquisite expression of nature and man and life take shape in verse? Why should we not, with Carlyle, declare verse out of date, an artificial thing, which expresses under crippling enc.u.mbrances what could be expressed in prose more clearly and more truthfully? To this question we may reply that rhymes and recurrences of equal syllables are indeed no essentials of true poetry.

Poetry has existed without them, and will exist without them. But, if not rhymes and equal syllables, yet rhythm and melody, moving concurrences of sounds, must for all time be elements of poetic utterance. The reason should be manifest. There is an indefinable sympathy between the spoken sound and the conceiving mood of the poet.

The poet conceives in moments of unusual sensibility, his mental part is vibrating, and that sensibility lends a corresponding movement to his language. When a poet says of himself--

I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing,

he expresses the truth that rhythm and melody lend themselves spontaneously to an inspiring thought. Poetry, like good music, comes of the possession of the movement. The mood in which poetry is conceived is the same mood in which men burst forth without premeditation into song.

The thoughts which come to the poet in his exaltation are, therefore, naturally wedded to melody and cadence.

Moreover, not only is a rhythmic music the natural utterance of impa.s.sioned thought for him who speaks. It is the necessary instrument for inducing the proper, the receptive, mood in him who hears. We know how it is with music, when all the air is vibrating and chanting with some vast organ-swell. We know how we are stirred to our inmost depths simply by mere harmony and sequence of sounds. We do not know why it is so, why our mood should be attuned to sorrow, gaiety, enthusiasm, heroism, meditation, by the hearing of music in its various kinds. We do not know, either, why the mere shapes of the sublime architecture of some great abbey or cathedral, or the blended colours of its deep-damasked window-stains, should fill our hearts with devout or poignant aspirations. Yet we know that the fact is so. And it is the same with poetry. The rhythm and melody which come spontaneously from the poet's mood dispose the hearer in the self-same way; they fit him to receive what the other brings. Verse, as we now understand that term, poetry need not be. But though it may look like prose because the lines stretch all across the page and cannot be measured by so many iambics or anapaests, yet, if it be real poetry, heart-felt and heart-moving, it will be but a delusive prose, a prose of infinitely subtle rhythms and harmonies. It will be as far removed as the Homeric hexameter from the pedestrian motion of cold argument.

Poetry will never fail us until nature fails. We may miss the transcendent voices now, but we have had during this century more than a century's usual share, and with the first widespread rise of some new moral fervour or lofty hope and aim the great poet cannot be wanting to give it shape in thrilling verse.

Poetry will never fail us. The poetry of nature will not fail us. So long as the sun shall each night and morning glorify the heavens with his inexhaustible splendours, or the majestic moon ride in her mysterious silence between the everchanging isles of cloud; so long as innumerable starry worlds s.h.i.+ne down their unspeakable peace into human hearts; so long as the flower shall open out its loveliness, dance in the breeze, shed its perfumes, and then close its petals in sleep and drink in the refreshment of the unfailing dew; so long as the tree shall put forth its tender greenery of leaf in the spring, blossom into gold and fire in summer and in the autumn bow down with fruits; so long as water shall leap and foam and thunder in cataracts down the mountain-side, or ripple and smile over the pebble or under the fern--so long shall the heart of man respond to sun and moon and stars, to flower and tree and stream, and there shall be poetry.

And as man's vision, intensified by the lens of science, pierces deeper and deeper into the universe of the ineffably great and the illimitably small, and as his wonder and awe increase with what they feed upon, so will the finer souls of humankind be thrilled and thrilled again with rich new suggestions and exquisite emotions, and they shall express them in poetry.

The poetry of man will not fail us. So long as man has a heart wherewith to love another better than himself, to feel the joy of possession or the pang of loss, to glow with pride at a nation's glories or mourn in its dejection, so long shall the lyric and the elegy, in whatsoever shape, create themselves ever afresh.

Till all our life, its inst.i.tutions, and its beliefs are perfect: till man has no doubts, no fears, no hopes: till he has a.n.a.lysed all his emotions and despises them: till the heavens above and the earth beneath can be read like a printed scroll: till nature has yielded up her last mystery: till that day poetry will exist among men.

And we may dare to a.s.sert that the future of poetry is destined to be greater than its past, that Tennyson's prayer will be fulfilled--

Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell, That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before But vaster,

And the expression of that music will be poetry.

MOSQUITOES: THEIR HABITS AND DISTRIBUTION

BY W. J. RAINBOW, F.L.S., F.E.S.

Entomologist to the Australian Museum, Sydney.

A neat booklet of 64 pp., well ill.u.s.trated, dealing with this interesting pest and its extermination.

"A most interesting and useful little book."--_Sunday Times_.

"This little book is worthy of a place with 'The Study of Australian b.u.t.terflies,' by the same careful writer."--_Ballarat Courier._

"A valuable contribution to Nature Study."--_The Herald._