A Study of Poetry Part 6

We have already noted that there are no mental images of feeling itself.

The images recognized by the consciousness of poets are those of experiences and objects a.s.sociated with feeling. The words employed to revive and transmit these images are usually described as "concrete" or "sensuous" in distinction from abstract or purely conceptual. They are "experiential" words, arising out of bodily or spiritual contact with objects or ideas that have been personalized, colored with individual feeling. Such words have a "fringe," as psychologists say. They are rich in overtones of meaning; not bare, like words addressed to the sheer intelligence, but covered with veils of a.s.sociation, with tokens of past experience. They are like s.h.i.+ps laden with cargoes, although the cargo varies with the texture and the history of each mind. It is probable that this very word "s.h.i.+p," just now employed, calls up as many different mental images as there are readers of this page. Brander Matthews has recorded a curious divergence of imagery aroused by the familiar word "forest." Half a dozen well-known men of letters, chatting together in a London club, tried to tell one another what "forest" suggested to each:

"Until that evening I had never thought of forest as clothing itself in different colors and taking on different forms in the eyes of different men; but I then discovered that even the most innocent word may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest suggested the st.u.r.dy oaks to be a.s.saulted by the woodlanders of Wess.e.x; and to Du Maurier it evoked the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain of France.

To Black the word naturally brought to mind the low scrub of the so-called deer-forests of Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a view of the green-clad mountains that towered up from the Scandinavian fiords. To Howells forest recalled the thick woods that in his youth fringed the rivers of Ohio; and to me there came back swiftly the memory of the wild growths, bristling unrestrained by man, in the Chippewa Reservation which I had crossed fourteen years before in my canoe trip from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. Simple as the word seemed, it was interpreted by each of us in accord with his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every language, since there must always be two partners in any communication by means of words, and the verbal currency pa.s.sing from one to the other has no fixed value necessarily the same to both of them."

[Footnote: Brander Matthews, _These Many Years_. Scribner's, New York, 1917.]

But one need not journey to London town in order to test this matter. Let half a dozen healthy young Americans stop before the window of a shop where sporting goods are exhibited. Here are fis.h.i.+ng-rods, tennis racquets, riding-whips, golf-b.a.l.l.s, running-shoes, baseball bats, footb.a.l.l.s, oars, paddles, snow-shoes, goggles for motorists, Indian clubs and rifles. Each of these physical objects focuses the attention of the observer in more or less exact proportion to his interest in the particular sport suggested by the implement. If he is a pa.s.sionate tennis player, a thousand motor-tactile memories are stirred by the sight of the racquet. He is already balancing it in his fingers, playing his favorite strokes with it, winning tournaments with it--though he seems to be standing quietly in front of the window. The man next him is already snowshoeing over the frozen hills. But if a man has never played lacrosse, or been on horseback, or mastered a canoe, the lacrosse racquet or riding-whip or paddle mean little to him emotionally, except that they may stir his imaginative curiosity about a sport whose pleasures he has never experienced. His eye is likely to pa.s.s them over as indifferently as if he were glancing at the window of a druggist or a grocer. These varying responses of the individual to the visual stimulus of this or that physical object in a heterogeneous collection may serve to ill.u.s.trate his capacity for feeling. Our chance group before the shop window thus becomes a symbol of all human minds as they confront the actual visible universe.

They hunger and thirst for this or that particular thing, while another object leaves them cold.

Now suppose that our half-dozen young men are sitting in the dark, talking--evoking body-and-mind memories by means of words alone. No two can possibly have the same memories, the same series of mental pictures.

Not even the most vivid and picturesque word chosen by the best talker of the company has the same meaning for them all. They all understand the word, approximately, but each _feels_ it in a way unexperienced by his friend. The freightage of significance carried by each concrete, sensuous, picture-making word is bound to vary according to the entire physical and mental history of the man who hears it. Even the commonest and most universal words for things and sensations--such as "hand," "foot," "dark,"

"fear," "fire," "warm," "home"--are suffused with personal emotions, faintly or clearly felt; they have been or are _my_ hand, foot, fear, darkness, warmth, happiness. Now the poet is like a man talking or singing in the dark to a circle of friends. He cannot say to them "See this" or "Feel that" in the literal sense of "see" and "feel"; he can only call up by means of words and tunes what his friends have seen and felt already, and then under the excitement of such memories suggest new combinations, new weavings of the infinitely varied web of human experience, new voyages with fresh sails upon seas untried.

It is true that we may picture the poet as singing or talking to himself in solitude and darkness, obeying primarily the impulse of expression rather than of communication. Hence John Stuart Mill's distinction between the orator and the poet: "Eloquence is _heard_; poetry is _over_heard.

Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind."

[Footnote: J. S. Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry," in _Dissertations_, vol. 1.

See also F. N. Scott, "The Most Fundamental Differentia of Poetry and Prose." Published by Modern Language a.s.sociation, 19, 2.]

But whether his primary aim be the relief of his own feelings (for a man swears even when he is alone!) or the communication of his feelings to other persons, it remains true that a poet's language betrays his bodily and mental history. "The poet," said Th.o.r.eau, "writes the history of his own body."

For example, a study of Browning's vocabulary made by Professor C. H.

Herford [Footnote: _Robert Browning_, Modern English Writers, pp. 244-66.

Blackwood & Sons. 1905.]

emphasizes that poet's acute tactual and muscular sensibilities, his quick and eager apprehension of s.p.a.ce-relations:

"He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of dazzling light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate, abrupt and plastic form.... He delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments of the eye. He caught at the edges of things.... _Spikes_ and _wedges_ and _swords_ run riot in his work.... He loved the grinding, clas.h.i.+ng and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids.... He is the poet of sudden surprises, unforseen transformations.... The simple joy in abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all vital and significant becoming."

The same truth is apparent as we pa.s.s from the individual poet to the poetic literature of his race. Here too is the stamp of bodily history.

Hebrew poetry, as is well known, is always expressing emotion in terms of bodily sensation.

"_Anger_," says Renan, [Footnote: Quoted by J. H. Gardiner, _The Bible as Literature_, p.

114.]

"is expressed in Hebrew in a throng of ways, each picturesque, and each borrowed from physiological facts. Now the metaphor is taken from the rapid and animated breathing which accompanies the pa.s.sion, now from heat or from boiling, now from the act of a noisy breaking, now from s.h.i.+vering. _Discouragement_ and _despair_ are expressed by the melting of the heart, _fear_ by the loosening of the reins.

_Pride_ is portrayed by the holding high of the head, with the figure straight and stiff. _Patience_ is a long breathing, _impatience_ short breathing, _desire_ is thirst or paleness. Pardon is expressed by a throng of metaphors borrowed from the idea of covering, of hiding, of coating over the fault. In _Job_ G.o.d sews up sins in a sack, seals it, then throws it behind him: all to signify that he forgets them....

"My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living G.o.d.

"Save me, O G.o.d; for the waters are come in unto my soul.

"I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.

"I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my G.o.d."

Greek poetry, likewise, is made out of "warm, swift, vibrating" words, thrilling with bodily sensation. Gilbert Murray [Footnote: "What English Poetry may Learn from Greek," _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1912.]

has described the weaving of these beautiful single words into patterns:

"The whole essence of lyric is rhythm. It is the weaving of words into a song-pattern, so that the mere arrangement of the syllables produces a kind of dancing joy.... Greek lyric is derived directly from the religious dance; that is, not merely the pattering of the feet, _but the yearning movement of the whole body_, the ultimate expression of emotion that cannot be pressed into articulate speech, compact of intense rhythm and intense feeling."

Nor should it be forgotten that Milton, while praising "a graceful and ornate rhetoric," declares that poetry, compared with this, is "more simple, sensuous and pa.s.sionate."

[Footnote: _Tract on Education._ ]

These words "sensuous" and "pa.s.sionate," dulled as they have become by repet.i.tion, should be interpreted in their full literal sense. While language is unquestionably a social device for the exchange of ideas and feelings, it is also true that poetic diction is a revelation of individual experience, of body-and-mind contacts with reality. Every poet is still an Adam in the Garden, inventing new names as fast as the new wonderful Beasts---so terrible, so delightful!--come marching by.

_3. Words as Current Coin_

But the poet's words, stamped and colored as they are by unique individual experience, must also have a general _transmission value_ which renders them current coin. If words were merely representations of private experience, merely our own nicknames for things, they would not pa.s.s the walls of the Garden inhabited by each man's imagination. "Expression"

would be possible, but "communication" would be impossible, and indeed there would be no recognizable terms of expression except the "bow-wow" or "pooh-pooh" or "ding-dong" of the individual Adam----and even these expressive syllables might not be the ones acceptable to Eve!

The truth is that though the impulse to expression is individual, and that in highly developed languages a single man can give his personal stamp to words, making them say what he wishes them to say, as Dante puts it, speech is nevertheless primarily a social function. A word is a social instrument. "It belongs," says Professor Whitney, [Footnote: W. D. Whitney, _Language and the Study of Language_, p. 404.]

"not to the individual, but to the member of society.... What we may severally choose to say is not language until it be accepted and employed by our fellows. The whole development of speech, though initiated by the acts of individuals, is wrought out by the community."

... A solitary man would never frame a language. Let a child grow up in utter seclusion, and, however rich and suggestive might be the nature around him, however full and appreciative his sense of that which lay without, and his consciousness of that which went on within him, he would all his life remain a mute."

What is more, the individual's mastery of language is due solely to his social effort in employing it. Speech materials are not inherited; they are painfully acquired. It is well known that an English child brought up in China and hearing no word of English will speak Chinese without a trace of his English parentage in form or idiom.

[Footnote: See Baldwin's _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_, article "Language."]

His own body-and-mind experiences will be communicated in the medium already established by the body-and-mind experiences of the Chinese race.

In that medium only can the thoughts of this English-born child have any transmission value. His father and mother spoke a tongue moulded by Chaucer and Shakspere, but to the boy whom we have imagined all that age-long labor of perfecting a social instrument of speech is lost without a trace. As far as language is concerned, he is a Chinaman and nothing else.

Now take the case of a Chinese boy who has come to an American school and college. Just before writing this paragraph I have read the blue-book of such a boy, written in a Harvard examination on Tennyson. It was an exceptionally well-expressed blue-book, in idiomatic English, and it revealed an unusual appreciation of Tennyson's delicate and sure felicities of speech. The Chinese boy, by dint of an intellectual effort of which most of his American cla.s.smates were incapable, had mastered many of the secrets of an alien tongue, and had taken possession of the rich treasures of English poetry. If he had been composing verse himself, instead of writing a college blue-book, it is likely that he would have preferred to use his own mother-tongue, as the more natural medium for the expression of his intimate thoughts and feelings. But that expression, no matter how artistic, would have "communicated" nothing whatever to an American professor ignorant of the Chinese language. It is clear that the power of any person to convey his ideas and emotions to others is conditioned upon the common possession of some medium of exchange.

4. _Words an Imperfect Medium_

And it is precisely here that we face one of the fundamental difficulties of the poet's task; a difficulty that affects, indeed, all human intercourse. For words are notoriously an imperfect medium of communication. They "were not invented at first," says Professor Walter Raleigh in his book on Wordsworth, "and are very imperfectly adapted at best, for the severer purposes of truth. They bear upon them all the weaknesses of their origin, and all the maims inflicted by the prejudices and fanaticisms of generations of their employers. They perpetuate the memory or prolong the life of many n.o.ble forms of human extravagance, and they are the monuments of many splendid virtues. But with all their abilities and dignities they are seldom well fitted for the quiet and accurate statement of the thing that is.... Beasts fight with horns, and men, when the guns are silent, with words. The changes of meaning in words from good to bad and from bad to good senses, which are quite independent of their root meaning, is proof enough, without detailed ill.u.s.tration, of the incessant nature of the strife. The question is not what a word means, but what it imputes."

[Footnote: Raleigh's _Wordsworth_. London, 1903.]

Now if the quiet and accurate statement of things as they are is the ideal language of prose, it is obvious that the characteristic diction of poetry is unquiet, inaccurate, incurably emotional. Herein lie its dangers and its glories. No poet can keep for very long to the "neutral style," to the cool gray wallpaper words, so to speak; he wants more color---pa.s.sionate words that will "stick fiery off" against the neutral background of conventional diction. In vain does Horace warn him against "purple patches"; for he knows that the tolerant Horace allowed himself to use purple patches whenever he wished. All employers of language for emotional effect--orators, novelists, essayists, writers of editorials--utilize in certain pa.s.sages these colored, heightened, figured words. It is as if they ordered their printers to set individual words or whole groups of words in upper-case type.

And yet these "upper-case words" of heightened emotional value are not really isolated from their context. Their values are relative and not absolute. Like the high lights of a picture, their effectiveness depends upon the tone of the composition as a whole. To insert a big or violent word for its own potency is like sewing the purple patch upon a faded garment. The predominant thought and feeling of a pa.s.sage give the richest individual words their penetrating power, just as the weight of the axe-head sinks the blade into the wood. "Futurist" poets like Marinetti have protested against the bonds of syntax, the necessity of logical subject and predicate, and have experimented with nouns alone.

"Words delivered from the fetters of punctuation," says Marinetti, "will flash against one another, will interlace their various forms of magnetism, and follow the uninterrupted dynamics of force."

[Footnote: There is an interesting discussion of Futurism in Sir Henry Newbolt's _New Study of English Poetry_. Dutton, 1919.]

But do they? The reader may judge for himself in reading Marinetti's poem on the siege of a Turkish fort:

"Towers guns virility flights erection telemetre exstacy toumbtoumb 3 seconds toumbtoumb waves smiles laughs plaff poaff glouglouglouglou hide-and-seek crystals virgins flesh jewels pearls iodine salts bromide skirts gas liqueurs bubbles 3 seconds toumbtoumb officer whiteness telemetre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-metres all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his post incline-7-degrees splendour jet pierce immensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys cries labyrinth mattress sobs ploughing desert bed precision telemetre monoplane cackling theatre applause monoplane equals balcony rose wheel drum trepan gad-fly rout arabs oxen blood-colour shambles wounds refuge oasis."

In these vivid nouns there is certainly some raw material for a poem, just as a heap of bits of colored gla.s.s might make material for a rose-window.

But both poem and window must be built by somebody: the s.h.i.+ning fragments will never fas.h.i.+on themselves into a whole.

5. _Predominant Tone-Feeling_

If each poem is composed in its own "key," as we say of music, with its own scale of "values," as we say of pictures, it is obvious that the separate words tend to take on tones and hues from the predominant tone-feeling of the poem. It is a sort of protective coloration, like Nature's devices for blending birds and insects into their background; or, to choose a more prosaic ill.u.s.tration, like dipping a lump of sugar into a cup of coffee. The white sugar and the yellowish cream and the black coffee blend into something unlike any of the separate ingredients, yet the presence of each is felt. It is true that some words refuse to be absorbed into the texture of the poem: they remain as it were foreign substances in the stream of imagery, something alien, stubborn, jarring, although expressive enough in themselves. All the pioneers in poetic diction a.s.sume this risk of using "un-poetic" words in their desire to employ expressive words. Cla.s.sic examples are Wordsworth's homely "tubs"

and "porringers," and Walt Whitman's catalogues of everyday implements used in various trades. _Oth.e.l.lo_ was hissed upon its first appearance on the Paris stage because of that "vulgar" word handkerchief. Thus "fork"

and "spoon" have almost purely utilitarian a.s.sociations and are consequently difficult terms for the service of poetry, but "knife" has a wider range of suggestion. Did not the peaceful Robert Louis Stevenson confess his romantic longing to "knife a man"?

But it is not necessary to multiply ill.u.s.trations of this law of connotation. The true poetic value of a word lies partly in its history, in its past employments, and partly also in the new vitality which it receives from each brain which fills the word with its own life. It is like an old violin, with its subtle overtones, the result of many vibrations of the past, but yet each new player may coax a new tune from it. When Wordsworth writes of

"The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills,"