A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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Even in poetry, then, the distinction between inside and outside,
content and form, has sometimes its value, and in other arts, like
painting and sculpture, it often becomes highly interesting and
instructive to attempt the separation of the two elements. The French
painter Millet, for instance, is said to have remarked to a pupil who
showed him a well-executed sketch: "You can paint. But what have you to
say?" The pupil's work had in Millet's eyes no "significance." The English
painter G. F. Watts often expressed himself in the same fashion: "I paint
first of all because I have something to say.... My intention has not been
so much to paint pictures that will charm the eye as to suggest great
thoughts that will appeal to the imagination and the heart and kindle all
that is best and noblest in humanity.... My work is a protest against the
modern opinion that Art should have nothing to say intellectually."

On the other hand, many distinguished artists and critics have given
assent to what has been called the "Persian carpet" theory of painting.
According to them a picture should be judged precisely as one judges a
Persian rug--by the perfection of its formal beauty, its harmonies of
line, color and texture, its "unity in variety." It is evident that the
men who hold this opinion are emphasizing form in the work of art, and
that Millet and Watts emphasized significance. One school is thinking
primarily of expression, and the other of that which is expressed. The
important point for the student of poetry to grasp is that this divergence
of opinion turns upon the question of relative emphasis. Even pure form,
or "a-priori form" as it has sometimes been called,--such as a
rectangle, a square, a cube,--carries a certain element of association
which gives it a degree of significance. There is no absolutely bare or
blank pattern. "Four-square" means something to the mind, because it is
intimately connected with our experience.
[Footnote: See Bosanquet, _Three Lectures on Aesthetic_, pp. 19, 29, 39,
and Santayana, _The Sense of Beauty_, p. 83.]
It cannot be a mere question of balance, parallelism and abstract "unity
in variety." The acanthus design in architectural ornament, the Saracenic
decoration on a sword-blade, aim indeed primarily at formal beauty and
little more. The Chinese laundryman hands you a red slip of paper covered
with strokes of black ink in strange characters. It is undecipherable to
you, yet it possesses in its sheer charm of color and line, something of
beauty, and the freedom and vigor of the strokes are expressive of
vitality. It is impossible that Maud's face should really have been

"Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
Dead perfection, no more."

Nevertheless, though absolutely pure decorative beauty does not exist, the
artist may push the decorative principle very far, so far, indeed, that
his product lacks interest and proves tedious or nonsensical. There is
"nonsense-verse," as we shall see later, which fulfills every condition
for pure formal beauty in poetry. Yet it is not poetry, but only
nonsense-verse.

Now shift the interest from the form to the meaning contained in the work
of art, that is, to its significance. An expressive face is one that
reveals character. Its lines are suggestive of something. They are
associated, like the lines of purely decorative beauty, with more or less
obscure tracts of our experience, but they arouse a keen mental interest.
They stimulate, they are packed closely with meaning, with fact, with
representative quality. The same thing is true of certain landscapes.
Witness Thomas Hardy's famous description of Egdon Heath in _The Return of
the Native_. It is true of music. Certain modern music almost breaks down,
as music, under the weight of meaning, of fact, of thought, which the
composer has striven to make it carry.

There is no question that the principle of significance may be pushed too
far, just as the principle of decorative or purely formal beauty may be
emphasized too exclusively. But is there any real antagonism between the
elements of form and significance, beauty and expressiveness? This
question has been debated ever since the time of Winckelmann and Lessing.
The controversy over the work of such artists as Wagner, Browning,
Whitman, Rodin has turned largely upon it.

Browning himself strove to cut the difficult aesthetic knot with a rough
stroke of common sense:

"Is it so pretty
You can't discover if it means hope, fear,
Sorrow or joy? Won't beauty go with these?"
[Footnote: "Fra Lippo Lippi."]

He tried again in the well-known passage from _The Ring and the Book_:

"So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
So note by note bring music from your mind
Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,--
So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside."

How Whistler, the author of _Ten O'Clock_ and the creator of exquisitely
lovely things, must have loathed that final line! But Bosanquet's
carefully framed definition of the beautiful, in his _History of
Aesthetic_, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims of
form and significance: "The beautiful is that which has characteristic or
individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to
the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium."
That is to say, in less philosophical language, that as long as you
observe the laws of formal beauty which belong to the medium in which you
are working, you may be as expressive or significant as you like. But the
artist must be obedient to the terms of his chosen medium of expression;
if he is composing music or poetry he must not break the general laws of
music or poetry in order to attempt that valiant enterprise of saving a
soul.

_4. The Man in the Work of Art_

Though there is much in this matter of content and form which is baffling
to the student of general aesthetic theory, there is at least one aspect
of the question which the student of poetry must grasp clearly. It is
this: there is nothing in any work of art except what some man has put
there. _What he has put in_ is our content question; _what shape he has
put it into_ is our form question. In Bosanquet's more technical language:
"A man is the middle term between content and expression." There is
doubtless some element of mystery in what we call creative power, but this
is a part of man's mystery. There is no mystery in the artist's material
as such: he is working in pigments or clay or vibrating sound or whatever
other medium he has chosen. The qualities and possibilities of this
particular medium fascinate him, preoccupy him. He comes, as we say, to
think in terms of color or line or sound. He learns or may learn in time,
as Whistler bade him, "never to push a medium further than it will go."
The chief value of Lessing's epoch-making discussion of "time-arts" and
"space-arts" in his _Laokoon_ consisted in the emphasis laid upon the
specific material of the different arts, and hence upon the varying
opportunities which one medium or another affords to the artist. But
though human curiosity never wearies of examining the inexhaustible
possibilities of this or that material, it is chiefly concerned, after
all, in the use of material as it has been moulded by the fingers and the
brain of a particular artist. The material becomes transformed as it
passes through his "shop," in some such way as iron is transformed into
steel in a blast furnace. An apparatus called a "transformer" alters the
wave-length of an electrical current and reduces high pressure to low
pressure, or the reverse. The brain of the artist seems to function in a
somewhat similar manner as it reshapes the material furnished it by the
senses, and expresses it in new forms. Poetry furnishes striking
illustrations of the transformations wrought in the crucible of the
imagination, and we must look at these in detail in a subsequent chapter.
But it may be helpful here to quote the testimony of two or three artists
and then to examine the psychological basis of this central function of
the artist's mind.

"Painting is the expression of certain sensations," said Carolus Duran.
"You should not seek merely to copy the model that is posed before you,
but rather to take into account the impression that is made upon the
mind.... Take careful account of the substances that you must
render--wood, metal, textures, for instance. When you fail to reproduce
nature _as you feel it_, then you falsify it. _Painting is not done with
the eyes, but with the brain_."

W. W. Story, the sculptor, wrote: "Art is art because it is not nature....
The most perfect imitation of nature is therefore not art. _It must pass
through the mind of the artist and be changed_. Art is nature reflected
through the spiritual mirror, and tinged with all the sentiment, feeling,
passion of the spirit that reflects it."

In John La Farge's _Considerations on Painting_, a little book which is
full of suggestiveness to the student of literature, there are many
passages illustrating the conception of art as "the representation of the
artist's view of the world." La Farge points out that "drawing from life
is an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the moment is
merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings,
former aspirations, former habits, images that we have cared for, and
through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entire
educated part of our nature."

One of La Farge's concrete examples must be quoted at length:
[Footnote: _Considerations on Painting_, pp. 71-73. Macmillan.]

"I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men,
artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all
the time, how to do this and how to do that; but absolutely
different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they
wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they
were well known to the public are concerned.

"What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was
merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the hills that lay
before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in
any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention
to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to
express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds
rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and
meadow-land below us, and the ground fell away suddenly before us.
Well, our three sketches were, in the first place, different in
shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of
drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually
indicates--as you know, or ought to know--whether we are looking far
or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more
nearly a square; the distance taken in to the right and left was
smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and
down--that is to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of
sky above--was greater. In each picture the clouds were treated with
different precision and different attention. In one picture the open
sky above was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the
upper sky was of no consequence--it was the clouds and the mountains
that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same, that is to say,
the general make of things; but each man had involuntarily looked
upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight; and though
the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously
preferred a beauty or an interest of things different from what his
neighbour liked.

"The colour of each painting was different--the vivacity of colour
and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole;
and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen
of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent
on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes.

"I wish you to understand, again, that we each thought and felt as if
we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first
desire of expressing _ourselves_, and I think would have been very
much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. And
we were each one true to nature.... If you ever know how to paint
somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of the student who has
not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of
his brain, you will always give to nature, that is to say, what is
outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see
it--which is yourself."

Such bits of testimony from painters help us to understand the brief
sayings of the critics, like Taine's well-known "Art is nature seen
through a temperament," G. L. Raymond's "Art is nature made human," and
Croce's "Art is the expression of impressions." These painters and critics
agree, evidently, that the mind of the artist is an organism which acts as
a "transformer." It receives the reports of the senses, but alters these
reports in transmission and it is precisely in this alteration that the
most personal and essential function of the artist's brain is to be
found.

Remembering this, let the student of poetry now recall the diagram used in
handbooks of psychology to illustrate the process of sensory stimulus of a
nerve-centre and the succeeding motor reaction. The diagram is usually
drawn after this fashion:

Sensory stimulus Nerve-centre Motor Reaction
________________________________O______________________________
--------------------> -------------------->

The process is thus described by William James:
[Footnote: _Psychology, Briefer Course_, American Science Series, p. 91.
Henry Holt.]

"The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical irritant, be this as
gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the
waves of light, convey the excitement to the nervous centres. The
commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but discharges
through the efferent nerves, exciting movements which vary with the
animal and with the irritant applied."

The familiar laboratory experiment irritates with a drop of acid the hind
leg of a frog. Even if the frog's brain has been removed, leaving the
spinal cord alone to represent the nervous system, the stimulus of the
acid results in an instant movement of the leg. Sensory stimulus,
consequent excitement of the nerve centre and then motor reaction is the
law. Thus an alarmed cuttlefish secretes an inky fluid which colors the
sea-water and serves as his protection. Such illustrations may be
multiplied indefinitely.
[Footnote: See the extremely interesting statement by Sara Teasdale,
quoted in Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_, p. 199. Macmillan, 1919.]
It may seem fanciful to insist upon the analogy between a frightened
cuttlefish squirting ink into sea-water and an agitated poet spreading ink
upon paper, but in both cases, as I have said elsewhere, "it is a question
of an organism, a stimulus and a reaction. The image of the solitary
reaper stirs a Wordsworth, and the result is a poem; a profound sorrow
comes to Alfred Tennyson, and he produces _In Memoriam_."
[Footnote: _Counsel upon the Reading of Books_, p. 219. Houghton Mifflin
Company.]

In the next chapter we must examine this process with more detail. But the
person who asks himself how poetry comes into being will find a
preliminary answer by reflecting upon the relation of "impression" to
"expression" in every nerve-organism, and in all the arts. Everywhere he
must reckon with this ceaseless current of impressions, "the stream of
consciousness," sweeping inward to the brain; everywhere he will detect
modification, selections, alterations in the stream as it passes through
the higher nervous centres; everywhere he will find these transformed
"impressions" expressed in the terms of some specific medium. Thus the
temple of Karnak expresses in huge blocks of stone an imagination which
has brooded over the idea of the divine permanence. The Greek
"discus-thrower" is the idealized embodiment of a typical kind of athlete,
a conception resulting from countless visual and tactile sensations. An
American millionaire buys a "Corot" or a "Monet," that is to say, a piece
of colored canvas upon which a highly individualized artistic temperament
has recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as it
has been interpreted by Corot's or Monet's eye and brain and hand. A
certain stimulus or "impression," an organism which reshapes impressions,
and then an "expression" of these transformed impressions into the terms
permitted by some specific material: that is the threefold process which
seems to be valid in all of the fine arts. It is nowhere more intricately
fascinating than in poetry.

CHAPTER II

THE PROVINCE OF POETRY

"The more I read and re-read the works of the great poets,
and the more I study the writings of those who have some
Theory of Poetry to set forth, the more am I convinced that
the question _What is Poetry?_ can be properly answered only if
we make _What it does_ take precedence of _How it does it_."
J. A. STEWART, _The Myths of Plato_

In the previous chapter we have attempted a brief survey of some of the
general aesthetic questions which arise whenever we consider the form and
meaning of the fine arts. We must now try to look more narrowly at the
special field of poetry, asking ourselves how it comes into being, what
material it employs, and how it uses this material to secure those
specific effects which we all agree in calling "poetical," however widely
we may differ from one another in our analysis of the means by which the
effect is produced.

Let us begin with a truism. It is universally admitted that poetry, like
each of the fine arts, has a field of its own. To run a surveyor's
line accurately around the borders of this field, determining what belongs
to it rather than to the neighboring arts, is always difficult and
sometimes impossible. But the field itself is admittedly "there," in all
its richness and beauty, however bitterly the surveyors may quarrel about
the boundary lines. (It is well to remember that professional surveyors do
not themselves own these fields or raise any crops upon them!) How much
map-making ingenuity has been devoted to this task of grouping and
classifying the arts: distinguishing between art and fine art, between
artist, artificer and artisan; seeking to arrange a hierarchy of the arts
on the basis of their relative freedom from fixed ends, their relative
complexity or comprehensiveness of effect, their relative obligation to
imitate or represent something that exists in nature! No one cares
particularly to-day about such matters of precedence--as if the arts were
walking in a carefully ordered ecclesiastical procession. On the other
hand, there is ever-increasing recognition of the soundness of the
distinction made by Lessing in his _Laokoon: or the Limits of Painting and
Poetry_; namely, that the fine arts differ, as media of expression,
according to the nature of the material which they employ. That is to say,
the "time-arts"--like poetry and music--deal primarily with actions that
succeed one another in time. The space-arts--painting, sculpture,
architecture--deal primarily with bodies that coexist in space. Hence
there are some subjects that belong naturally in the "painting" group, and
others that belong as naturally in the "poetry" group. The artist should
not "confuse the genres," or, to quote Whistler again, he should not push
a medium further than it will go. Recent psychology has more or less upset
Lessing's technical theory of vision,
[Footnote: F. E. Bryant, _The Limits of Descriptive Writing_, etc. Ann
Arbor, 1906.]
but it has confirmed the value of his main contention as to the fields
of the various arts.

_1. The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice_

An illustration will make this matter clear. Let us take the Greek myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice, which has been utilized by many artists during more
than two thousand years assuredly, and how much longer no one knows.
Virgil told it in the _Georgics_ and Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_. It
became a favorite theme of medieval romance, and whether told in a French
_lai_ or Scottish ballad like "King Orfeo," it still keeps, among all the
strange transformations which it has undergone, "the freshness of the
early world." Let us condense the story from King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon
version of Boethius's _De Consolatione Philosophiae_: "There was once a
famous Thracian harper named Orpheus who had a beautiful wife named
Eurydice. She died and went to hell. Orpheus longed sorrowfully for her,
harping so sweetly that the very woods and wild beasts listened to his
woe. Finally, he resolved to seek her in hell and win her back by his
skill. And he played so marvelously there that the King of Hell to reward
him gave him back his wife again, only upon the condition that he should
not turn back to look at her as he led her forth. But, alas, who can
constrain love? When Orpheus came to the boundary of darkness and light,
he turned round to see if his wife was following--and she vanished."

Such was the myth in one of its manifold European forms. It deals
obviously with a succession of events, with actions easily narratable by
means of a "time-art" like poetry. The myth itself is one of fascinating
human interest, and if a prose writer like Hawthorne had chosen to tell it
in his _Wonder-Book_, we should doubtless speak of it as a "poetic" story.
We should mean, in using that adjective, that the myth contained
sentiment, imagination, passion, dramatic climax, pathos--the qualities
which we commonly associate with poetry--and that Hawthorne, although a
prose writer, had such an exquisite sympathy for Greek stories that his
handling of the material would be as delicate, and the result possibly as
lovely, as if the tale had been told in verse. But if we would realize the
full value of Lessing's distinction, we must turn to one of the countless
verse renderings of the myth. Here we have a succession of actions,
indeed, quite corresponding to those of the prose story. But these images
of action, succeeding one another in time, are now evoked by successive
musical sounds,--the sounds being, as in prose, arbitrary word-symbols of
image and idea,--only that in poetry the sounds have a certain ordered
arrangement which heightens the emotional effect of the images evoked.
Prose writer and poet might mean to tell precisely the same tale, but in
reality they cannot, for one is composing, no matter how cunningly, in the
tunes of prose and the other in the tunes of verse. The change in the
instrument means an alteration in the mental effect.

Now turn to Lessing's other exemplar of the time-arts, the musician--for
musicians as well as poets, painters and sculptors have utilized the myth
of Orpheus and Eurydice. What can the musician do with the theme? Gluck's
opera may serve for answer. He cannot, by the aid of music alone, call up
very definite ideas or images. He cannot tell the Orpheus story clearly to
one who has never heard it. But to one who already knows the tale, a
composer's overture--without stage accessories or singing actors or any
"operatic" devices as such--furnishes in its successions and combinations
of musical sound, without the use of verbal symbols, a unique pleasurable
emotion which strongly and powerfully reinforces the emotions suggested by
the Orpheus myth itself. Certain portions of the story, such as those
relating to the wondrous harping, can obviously be interpreted better
through music than through the medium of any other art.

What can Lessing's "space-arts," sculpture and painting, do with the
material furnished by the Orpheus myth? It is clear that they cannot tell
the whole story, since they are dealing with "bodies that coexist" rather
than with successive actions. They must select some one instant of action
only, and preferably the most significant moment of the whole, the parting
of husband and wife. In the museum at Naples there is the wonderful Greek
treatment of this theme, in sculptured high relief. The sculptor has
chosen the moment of parting. Hermes, the messenger of the gods to recall
Eurydice, has twined his hand gently around the left hand of the woman.
With her right hand she still touches her husband, but the dread instant
is upon them all. The sculptor, representing the persons in three
dimensions, as far as high relief allows, has sufficiently
characterized their faces and figures, and with exquisite sense of rhythm
and balance in his composition has fulfilled every requirement of formal
beauty that marble affords.

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