LIFE IN POETRY.
pOETRY, said Mr. Courthope in the lecture which he delivered in the Taylor Institution on Saturday last, is "the art which produces pleasure for the imagination by imitating human actions, thoughts, and passions in metrical language." Poetry, said Matthew Arnold, is "the criticism of life." Is either of these definitions adequate P Is it not truer to say that poetry is a real addition to the life of man, or at all events an emancipation, a manumission, of that life,
wherever it is prepared for emancipation, and needs only the signal to go free P " Imitation," " criticism," these are sadly in- adequate and limiting words. In every true poem, life as surely rushes into a new form of mental existence as when the child lets loose his heart in his first free scamper over the hills, or as when " the young light-hearted Masters of the waves " snatched at the rudder "and shook out more sail " "And day and night held on indignantly O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale, Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves Outside the Western Straits."
All poetry is an act of emancipation, even the poetry of elegy, even the " lyrical cry," even the poetry of satire and invective. There is no mere imitativeness in poetry. It is a liberation of the true mind. Even when Pope exclaims in his half-histrionic fashion,—
" Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things To low ambition and the pride of Kings," he is trying in his own artificial way to break s, sort of bondage, — not to impose a new bondage, the bondage of literary fetters. Every great poem has been a great stroke for freedom, for the freedom of the heart and mind. Professor Courthope said well that when great poets like Milton and Dante (why did he not begin with Homer?) introduced their poems with a solemn invocation to the Muse, they held that the life "and much even of the form of their work" was" contained germinally in their matter." It was of the first importance that they should direct their thoughts to a subject on which
they could speak with authority and freedom, on which, in fact, they could strike away some fetters by which the mind of man had previously been bound. That was what the in- vocation to the Muse meant; it was a prayer to be directed to the region in which they could most effectually set free their own souls. And when Professor Courthope says that it is a con. dition of true poetry not only that the subject should suit the singer, but that it should also suit the audience, that it should be one in which the listeners themselves are eager for the password which will set their imaginations on fire, that is only another way of saying that poetry should not only liberate the mind of the poet, but also the minds of those to whose more or lees constrained and over-burdened hearts the poet brings a new impulse of free and buoyant movement. That is the real essence of poetry. Even the least popular of poets, the most "caviare to the general," even Shelley and Spenser and Arnold and Clough, and the poets who are said to be rather the poets of the poetic, than the poets of the mass of man- kind, loose some fetter on the mind or heart of their readers which had weighed heavily on their predecessors. Such a poet as Gray, for instance, a recluse, fastidious, almost academic, gives a profounder sense of emancipation to the world of tranquil, meditative misers in his famous elegy, than any other poet of his century, unless it were Burns or Wordsworth, of whom the latter really led the way into a new century of poetry, and shot back a bolt in the human breast which almost the whole of the present century has busied itself in securing against any recoil. All poetry is emancipation, is a new life, a new freedom; and it is quite true, as Professor Courthorpe asserts, that even satire, even such a poem as Pope's letter to Mr. Arbuthnot., with the profound scorn of its vivid por- traiture, seems to open to us the way into a fresh world, and thereby, as we believe, to strike the characteristic note of all poetry, by inspiring a new current of indignant and scornful emotion. Of course satire opens the narrowest of these avenues to fresh life. It only destroys those artificial barriers which never really hold back any but purely con- ventional natures from the " fresh woods and pastures new" of the human spirit. Still even satire does that, and does it effectually. It is only an artificial bondage that it breaks, but since many of our worst fetters are artificial fetters which we have fastened upon ourselves, and which the true man does not feel, satire has its liberating influence, and often sets us free from fetters which we have welcomed in the inmost recesses of our own souls.
Professor Courthorpe holds that the great vein of pessimism in modern poetry is more or less due to the tendency of poets to "think of nature and society in those romantic moulds of the imagination which no longer corresponded with the reality of things." We should not have thought that the poetry of the present day exhibited any such tendency. In fact, it has been too realistic, and shown signs of revolt not only against romantic conceptions of life, but against all those restraining influences which are the very secret of true freedom. For freedom and emancipation cannot be secured without willingly submitting the heart and mind to those natural restraining influences which are bred in the inmost recesses of our being. We should have said that, far from showing any tendency to conform too closely to the old romantic moulds of human thought, and to fret at the discrepancy between the world of romance and the world of reality, the tendency of the present day had been to ignore altogether the moral limits within which alone we can be truly free, and to attempt to liberate ourselves from the authority of the truest self within us and seek after an un- natural freedom which is really the most galling bondage. After all freedom is a relative word. You cannot be free from your nature, you can only be free in your nature, in your highest nature. And no bondage is more cruel, more intolerable, than the bondage which comes of fighting against the very law of your own true nature. It is there as it seems to us that the pessimism of the newer poetry arises. It springs from a reluctance to bear the only yoke with which we cannot dispense without ceasing to be our true selves. Even the great poet who endeavoured so vainly in his prose writings to accomplish the impossible task of reconciling the scepticism with the faith of the day, even Matthew Arnold, felt keenly that there was something in man, as well as in the universe outside man, which rendered it impossible to attain the highest freedom without submitting himself to the mysterious yoke within him,—a yoke which he would not ignore, though he would not welcome it,—and he ended his wonderfully im- pressive lines on " Resignation" in this half-heartedly reluc- tant strain :— " Enough, we live :—and if a life,
With large results so little rife, Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth ; Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread, The solemn hills around us spread, This stream that falls incessantly, The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky, If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
And even could the intemperate prayer Man iterates, while these forbear, For movement, for an ampler sphere,.
Pierce Fate's impenetrable ear; Not milder is the general lot Because our spirits have forgot.
In action's dizzying eddy whirl'd, The something that infects the world."
Surely the "something that infects the world,"—our modern world at least,—is the unhealthy reluctance to resign ourselves to the will of that divine power which " built this fabric of things," and which has found it essential for us to administer to us suffering in many forms in order to open our shrinking and limited nature to larger issues than any to which the natural man is ready to adapt himself. We recoil like a sensitive plant from the first rude touch, and yet it is only through these rude touches, and many of them, that our natures can be taught to expand to the craving for higher ideals and the appreciation of nobler efforts. We want to shrink to the dimensions of poorer natures, though we are destined to find our only true happiness in the evolution of a greater fortitude and of loftier hopes.
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