1300 KS.
LECTURES ON POETRY.*
PROFESSORS to-day are many and multifarious, but it is a comewhatscutious fact that ''"among the two hundred and fifty siniversities of the modern world " Oxford alone can claim to possess a ' Professor of Poetry. And, perhaps, it is well that it should- be so. For if "neither gods,'.' as Horace tells us, -" nor men, nor booksellers allow mediocrity in poets," it is surely:needful that those who talk about them ex cathedra should only be men of rare and exceptional endowments. A Professor of Poetry who was " mediocre" or commonplace would be at once intolerable ; but happily no one can associate :Mr. MaCkail with either adjective, and he is in such favour even with.' the booksellers "—the sternest arbiters in Horace's tripartite tribunal—that he has now added a third to his two previous .wolusnes of published lectureS, That it is equal to the fOi'mer two—The Springs of :Helicon and Lectures on Greek Poetry—it would, however,. be venturesome to assert. There is the same abounding knowledge, the came iasight, the same singular delicacy both of feeling • and expression, but there is not the same unity of: design. The writer in these *sing lectures seems, as it were; to pave been " gathering up • the fragments," and the reader consequently finds himself partaking of such iniscellaieoui:fare as " Virgil and Virelianism," "Arabian Lyric Poetry," " The Divine Comedy," " The Poetry of 'Oxford, or an essay on " Imagination." The dishes are all good, many of them indeed choice ; but they are so diverse in character, and their succession is so rapid, that the effect is rather to tax digestion and render the judgment some- what confused just when it ought to be most delicate and discriminating ; for throughout these essays Mr. Mackail not
o nly comments on actual poetry, but is also, it would seem, endeavouring--and it is the most subtle of literary problems —to disengage, as it were, from such actual poetry some - conception of what " poetry " is essentially and in itself.
The Muse, in fact, during his later lectures has been perpetually perplexing the Professor. She has stood beside his Chair, and, while he was illustrating her charms, has constantly been interrupting him with questions about her :soul. Or, to put it less figuratively, Mr. Mackail has been haunted by an obtrusive anxiety really to understand what it is he has been talking about. He desires to know what " poetry " is, not when it has embodied itself in a 'particular poem, but as a spiritual and shaping in- fluence, or, in Platonic language, as an " idea " by virtue of which what would otherwise be verse becomes poetical. And this is a difficult matter to determine. For just as Augustine says somewhere, with regard to " time," that if he were not asked what time was he knew, but if he were asked he did not know, so it is with regard to poetry. A. thousand attempts have been made to explain it. An early (Father, for example, calls it "vinum daemonum," a sort of devil's brew distilled from words to destroy the judgment; Macaulay, somewhat in the same vein, says that it is " the art of employ- ing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the
imagination "; Wordsworth would have it to be "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science " ; and Shelley, " the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best, minds " ; but it is obvious that these epigrams, of which Mr; Mackail collects many, in reality tell us almost nothing. Nor when Coleridge terms it "the best words in the best order," or Dryden, " articulate music," or Simonides, " speaking picture," are we one whit better off. And when Mr. Mackail enunciates the theory that " just as the technical art of poetry consists in making patterns out of language, so the vital function of poetry consists in making patterns out Of life," he hardly seems to throw new light upon the subject. We all know that every poem exhibits some 'sort of " pattern," varying from the elaborate design of a Pindaric ode to the simplicity of a nursery rhyme, and that verse is thus distinguished from prose ; but what does he mean by saying that "the vital function of poetry "—that is, we presume, something by doing which it
• Lectures on Poetry, B3 J. W. MAO, LL.D., formerly Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, London : Lcnirmans and Co. [10s. Gd. net."'
proves itself to be poetry—" consists in making patterns out of life " P The phrase is repeated again and again—though in somewhat varying shapes—but nowhere does its author give a clear explanation of it. What, for example, is " life " Sometimes he seems to mean human life, as when he says that " poetry is a pattern of life s and condenses out of the flying vapours of the world an image of human pollee, tion," although obviously there is much poetry—the Ode to a Skylark, for instance, or Milton's description of Satan as he rises from the burning lake—which is at once of the highest excellence and also almost wholly unconnected with either " patterns" or " human life." But, perhaps, he is generally thinking of all life, as it exists everywhere throughout the universe, so that it is in the whole scheme of things that poetry finds " the patterns, latent and implicit," which it is its function to reveal. Yet, surely, if this be so, poetry is passing outside its own province to usurp that of history and science, of philosophy and theology, all of which are properly engaged in finding out " the patterns, latent and implicit," in the great life of the universe, so that Mr. Mackail's explanation rather confuses than defines, and we fail to see how he has improved on Shelley's statement that "poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar," which, though it adds little to our knowledge, is at least clear and simple.
Mr. Mackail has, however, developed a strong tendency to be abstruse, for later on he is led to consider that " larger and more profound view" which regards poetry not as a " move- ment," the progress of which can be traced historically, " but as a substance, solid, continuous, and in a sense unchange- able," which has "a more solid reality than can be claimed for anything else made or handled by mankind," and may " by a fertile and impressive analogy " be compared with that "Ether of Space" to which Clerk Maxwell and Sir Oliver Lodge assign almost infinite permanence and power. But such transcendental investigations exceed the range of ordinary minds, and we are compelled to consider a simpler instance of his love for abstract speculation, for, in dealing with the interesting question whether the Aurry and com- plexity of modern life are likely to injure poetry, he writes thus : " If poetry be, as it is, a f unction of life, life at great complexity means poetry of great range ; life at high stress means poetry at high tension; life at great speed means poetry in rapid movement," and he concludes that " the progress of poetry will follow and sustain the progress of life." Yet surely this speculative judgment seems to run contrary to common feeling and experience. Life to-day ill London, Paris, andNew York is certainly "at high stress," but does any one suppose that it therefore tends to create great poets P "Calm Peace and Quiet," "retired Leisure, that in trim gardens takes his pleasure,"" the mute Silence," and com- panionship with "the Cherub Contemplat:ot "—these are what poets sought in the past, but it is amid telegraphs and telephones in express trains and amid the roar of Threadneedle Street that the poetry of the future will, it seems, find a higher tension and so, presumably, a higher life. For ourselves we doubt it. Poetry is, we think, at its best and most at home when it deals chiefly with what is simple, elemental, natural. At times, no doubt, it tricks itself out with ornaments borrowed from art, science, and philosophy, or seeks to evolve out of the turmoil of modern life some novel and even surprising harmony, but great poetry, the poetry which is approved by "the secure judgment of the whole 'world," is such just because it springs from those feelings which are not induced by the complex conditions of an artificial civilization, but are common to humanity everywhere and in all ages. And it is just these deep and primitive emotions which, amid the stress of modern life and in the absorption of its innumerable outward interests, tend inevitably to become feebler and less active. To-day the hurly-burly and endless agitation that surround us distract and do not intensify. that inward and meditative mood in which poetry, like religion, has its secret and untroubled source. Could, for instance, any man have written the Book of Job amid the uproar of a metropolis P Think of the setting which the unknown author of that
supreme poem gives to his work : " So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him." And it was then, after sitting motionless beneath heaven and the stars for seven days and seven nights
that Job "opened his mouth" in words which have in them the very soul and essence of the highest poetry. There was no life at " great complexity," nothing of what we call " high stress," and certainly nothing of " rapid movement" among the conditions which then prevailed "in the land of Uz," but that old poet had, we think, a truer sense of the surroundings ln, which poetry is born that are indicated in this volume.
But we are ourselves being lured into those morasses of speculation in which Mr. Mackail, like every one else, can at test but flounder. Like " life," or " time," or " music," or ," beauty," so, too, " poetry " admits of no final explanation. We can all speculate ; but we can never know. And the pity of it is that Mr. Mackail, who struggles to be a philosopher, was born to be a critic. As a true critic, that is, as an inter- preter of actual poetry, lie has hardly an equal. All through these lectures when he deals with poetry, not as an idea, but as something realized, whatever he touches he illuminates. He teaches us to distinguish between gold and tinsel; he makes us sec where we were blind and feel where before we were dull. And that is what a Professor of Poetry should do, leaving it to the schoolmen to define the undefinable.
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