THE DISADVANTAGES OF KNOW. ING POETRY.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 395, 2 January 1909, Page 9

THE DISADVANTAGES OF KNOW. ING POETRY.

1 A writer.-in tho ■" Atlantic Monthly " descants on the folly of learning noble-verse by heart. ;. He complains.' (says l an'-: exchange), half • in : earnest, half in ; jest, that he. can never see' a landscape w-ith his-owri .eyes: but some.lines from' a. dead poet ,will come:before: them and substitute changeling impressions : more beautiful, it may. be, but stilh-not his own ; that Byron bids him stand and, de-liver'in;-the, Roman Coliseum and threatens to take his; all; that Wordsworth steals up like.'a .thief and picks his mind of its own perceptions ; - and half-remembered' Shelley tortures'him with the chase;of some dancing shadow. Surely there is no one .who loves poetry .for. its heart of meaning and not for its, skin-deep beauty who has not known this annoyance:.and^felt .like .one of Plato!s prisoners doomed to watch.shadows ,on the wall of his cave'and incapable of turning his; head towards the light from which-..these,literary, ..reflections' come. And if "he'has never .pitied himself, lie must often have been angry ..with a. friend who has destroyed ;some moment. of ecstasy by ;an intrusive 'literary;reminiscence. "3?or that reason true friends are' often happiest during thosenoble silences in,which the heart is making-its o^ra'poetry, directly, out of its.own emotions.:. It is. one-of.the vipes of. our modern , li.terary. spirit that it often.'prefersv.to .take its: emotions ..and its perceptions ready .made by;one of . the .great poets and, dislikes the. slow and laborious fashioning of. ■thought .to beauty of expression which is. the, true, poetical process."; One of 'the commonest; symptoms of. this- the passion for ex 7 aptness; of 'quotation. The ancients liked- to, quote inaccurately' and. loosely, .not put' of dis-, respect to s the poet, but; to, show that his.words had been assimilated and become part of themselves.. It ;is much, more .'important that ppetry should be . absorbed, even .though it lose some of its; perfection in_ the process,, than- that "it should comb; trippingly, off .the tongue. Our .excessiya respect: for hteralness in . quotation is - indeed one; sigh . that poetryhas. ceas?d.to. be a social aud;become' a seifish.'Juxury bf.'the librafy-Triiotiari aid the. enjoynyent : : of;'oUr' idle .substitute,',forthem. ; The' iideal; would, ;be to have read'and khowri' all poetry arid to have forgotten that one ever knew it, so that there should always bo a _ senso of personal effort' and the'joy-of creation in the translatibn .of'emotion into perfect expression..One, may quote another man's ;pootry with perfect .accuracy arid;bo equipped beforehand with an; 'ai'moury of;ippropriate and ready-made;, satibna; perfectly-j expressed,and.;,still 'in .ai]lJ 'probability, lie nothing but. a literaryi-bore.'{ Brit tlie ideal both for himself and especially for is for a man to have so ninch poetry-in hip that ;ho,,t&lks r poetry :withorit . ;know'ing.it,.'eveh-;as others talk' : prose., | . THE HORRIBLE IN LITERATURE. wants' to make your flesh creep," said the fat. bojr ;to Miss Rachel Wardle. '"''Veal-, and-haiii ■. pies' and stertorous.' slumbers; are' .whatwe chiefly-'-,associate with that;bulky youth j .w'e'.are not apt to think of him as.an artist". v' Yet-'many artists, particularly:'iriusical arid, literary ones, : have been fat; boys'; and " the" ; desire;, which ,-:the; jnan: of 'Mr., War.dle, so crudely, expressed; tothe.'.timorous; Raohel',, showed-,that; far within his. ''owri; three-pilpd-' fl'eshi there lurked the soul' bf "a .novelist ;or: a dramatist.. He was;a mute, irigiorious; Maupassant,' a '- Stevenson guiltless.;of' his,.country's shudders. -';Ih vpfie 'iriiportant 'matter,' indeed, lie" was; above; /die majority', of' artists. - He was entirely'disin-terested;,-'He .would : not sell, shudders, nor look to- goose-flesh; for goldeii_ eggs. He would not' even sully artistry with cupboard gratitude; with tears in; his.'eyes:.he deprecated Miss „ Wardle's tactless allusions to "enough to cat" and "not too much to' do." .lit:'tho, 'most' literal of - senses, he practised, do'ctriiie.of ; ; art .for, art's, sak'e.;. He, only, wanted:;ouo thing—to (make another .'human .being's flesh creep. When ho had done that he-'would-be happier than Whistler .was .when he finished-tho Peacock room—for Whistler istill wanted 2000.guineas from Mr. Leyland. ,-! The fat boy, however, though potentially a true artist, 'had narrow, views.. He; .was a; - the fleshy school.; Ho regarded '..the:-shudder as' an end : ;in itself, : whereas with the classic: artist-it is a'.means; ■to; an end.' ; But the question,- To'what:end?, finds, us, between the- Scylla" of ''ascribirig ' a direct moral purpose to the Greek arid Elizabethan dramatists, and the : Charybdis .of denying ; theni' ariy moral, piirpose whatever.!. The truth is 'that tho great dramatists, were' neither, mere, pulpiteers nor' mere; sensationalists." : The end they had ; in; view in tragedy : was no doubt to create a shudder, but it was. a shudder of tlie ' soul rather; than of the body; horror cannot''but have ai moral significance when its physical -.manifestations are only the outward-symbols of the; spiritual, tragedy which, in, the Greek drama, resulted; from;'the : blind, conflict of human will with, the,, inscrutable, 'destiny, and. which was ..."inherent in the temperaments and inter-rela-tions of the.'personages,of Elizabetl]an:drama. These symbols,' in. a great work, must. be. striking* iri themselves; tlie, stories of Oedipus and Othello; told in the coldest of reporting style's, would-arrest, the attention even of those ivho ; knew .riothuig of the curso of the Labdacidae or the couditioris-of tlie, Othello menage.But obviously the' artistic • effect depends'upon-a right correspohdence,between the'.'symbol and-the thing tween 'tlie physical horror a'nd. the spiritual tragedy. .'."Othello" fizzling. out in;a':.divorce case,with; a. 'triumphant; vindication- 'of -tlie character., of Des'demona, : . would really -.be. no .more ridiculous .than: M. ',' Lemairo s "Lb Pardon" flaring up at the- end-'into a.double murder and . a suicide. Biit : we._ do . not, requirb to 'resort to. hypothetical instanced of grotesquely ineffective horrors, lior even to go" l boyond thb list of.the,- authontio'masters of the. spiritually horrible. ! Did not the same pen 'that'wrote "Faustus" arid ".Edward the Second",, also write "The Jew of Malta" ?- ; Marlowe's failure to", secure' an artistic effect . by a niero piling up of imaginary physical horrors:would seem to'have had a deterrent'effect upon his , successors, for the noxt 'essay, a brilliantly - successful one, was in the; region of the'aictual.- Defoe's "Journal of the' Plagup Year,"; with its pedestrian, matter-of-factness' and its deliberate assumption of a. cbmmonplaco point of view, and a deceptively coinmonplace style, was the model for the highest mpdern achieveinents in tho horrible—the stories, of Poo, Stevenson, and -Maupassant, and even, indirectly, the poems of Baudelaire, which are' only the broodings of morbid fancy over 'squalid and mundane horrors. In the interim;'however, as a by-product, of. the Komantic Movement, had come the 'haunted-' churchyard school of Britain and Germany, which attempted, by high literary garnishing, to recommend to modern tastes a rehash of the superstitions that medieval palates had accepted raw with trembling and uncritical Even poems like "Leonofc" and "The Ancient Mariner" could not ■_ kobp, jjseiido-mecUevalism alive; but it sspirit. re-

inforced by that of modern occultism, passed into fiction, and involved tho apparently impassive literalism of Poo and Maupassant in a lurid atmosphere a thousand times more terrifying than tho painted mists and stage mooniights of the early Bomantics. Poo and Maupassant are still the unquestioned masters of horror-for-horror's-sake, and those who would succeed in that lower but still distinctly artistic'province of literature . must learn from these writers to arrango the transparently .'probable so as to bring out tho maximum of latent terror, or else- to carrj the realistic .method from tho region'of tho probable into that of tho barely possible so deftly that the reader will never know when lie has passed : tlie frontier. The latter plan might 7 seem to apply: specially to the treatment of the moclern occult.' But.here is a paradox: Scott and Coleridge secured better egects ;witli.medieval superstitions, in which nobody beliijved, than modorn writers secure with latter-day occultism,, iu which everybody half believes'r Possibly the reason, is that medieval superstitions, being out with the province of science, left the imagination free; whereas modern occultism is. sub judice of scienco, and imagination has given place to curiosity.; But even.'if this were not so, a reckless exploitation.of the..possibilities' of spiritualism, hypnotism, dual personality, arid the.like,.is-almost certain to draw the fancy ahead of the imagination, and, by fusing physical with spiritual horror, .to .lose at once the. symbol and the thing symbolised. That way lie deeper depths of ineffectiveness than were'sounded in "Tho Jew of Malta." i