XXII. THE THEORY OF POETRY

MATTHEW ARNOLD once advised people who wished to know what was good poetry not to trouble themselves with definitions of poetry, but to learn by heart passages, or even single lines, from the works of the great poets, and to apply these as touchstones. Certainly a book like Mr. Cowl's Theory of Poetry in England, which aims at giving us a representative selection of the theoretical things which were said in England about poetry between the time of Elizabeth and the time of Victoria, makes one wonder at the barrenness of men's thoughts about so fruitful a world as that of the poets. Mr. Cowl's book is not intended to be read as an anthology of fine things. Its value is not that of a book of golden thoughts. It is an ordered selection of documents chosen, not for their beauty, but simply for their use as milestones in the progress of English poetic theory. It is a work, not of literature, but of literary history; and students of literary history are under a deep debt of gratitude to the author for bringing together and arranging the documents of the subject in so convenient and lucid a form. The arrangement is under subjects, and chronological. There are forty-one pages on the theory of poetic creation, beginning with George Gascoigne and ending with Matthew Arnold. These are followed by a few pages of representative passages about poetry as an imitative art, the first of the authors quoted being Roger Ascham and the last F. W. H. Myers. The book is divided into twelve sections of this kind, some of which have a tendency to overlap. Thus, in addition to the section on poetry as an imitative art, we have a section on imitation of nature, another on external nature, and another on imitation. Imitation, in the last of these, it is true, means for the most part imitation of the ancients, as

in the sentence in which Thomas Rymer urged the seventeenth-century dramatists to imitate Attic tragedy even to the point of introducing the chorus.

Mr. Cowl's book is interesting, however, less on account of the sections and subsections into which it is divided than because of the manner in which it enables us to follow the flight of English poetry from the romanticism of the Elizabethans to the neo-classicism of the eighteenth century, and from this on to the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and from this to a later neo-classicism whose prophet was Matthew Arnold. There is not much of poetry captured in these cold-blooded criticisms, but still the shadow of the poetry of his time occasionally falls on the critic's formulæ and aphorisms. How excellently Sir Philip Sidney expresses the truth that the poet does not imitate the world, but creates a world, in his observation that Nature's world "is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden!" This, however, is a fine saying rather than an interpretation. It has no importance as a contribution to the theory of poetry to compare with a passage like that so often quoted from Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

As a theory of poetic creation this may not apply universally. But what a flood of light it throws on the creative genius of Wordsworth himself! How rich in psychological insight it is, for instance, compared with Dryden's comparable reference to the part played by the memory in poetry :

The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the poet . . . is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after.

1

As a matter of fact, few of these generalizations carry one far. Ben Jonson revealed more of the secret of poetry when he said simply: "It utters somewhat above a mortal mouth." So did Edgar Allan Poe, when he said: "It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above." Coleridge, again, initiates us into the secrets of the poetic imagination when he speaks of it as something which

combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, which is alone truly one.

On the other hand, the most dreadful thing that was ever written about poetry was also written by Coleridge, and is repeated in Mr. Cowl's book:

How excellently the German Einbildungskraft expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the faculty that forms the many into one-Ineins-bildung! Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, either catoptric or metoptric-repeating simply, or by transposition-and, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.

again,

The meaning is simple enough: it is much the same as that of the preceding paragraph. But was there ever a passage written suggesting more forcibly how much easier it is to explain poetry by writing it than by writing about it?

Mr. Cowl's book makes it clear that, fiercely as the critics may dispute about poetry, they are practically all agreed on at least one point-that it is an imitation. The schools have differed less over the question whether it is an imitation than over the question how, in a discussion on the nature of poetry, the word "imitation" must be qualified. Obviously, the poet must imitate something - either what he sees in nature, or what he sees in memory, or what he sees in other poets, or what he sees in his soul, or it may be, all together. There arise schools every now and then-classicists, Parnassians, realists, and so forth-who believe in imitation, but will

not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen in the imaginative world. In the result their work is no true imitation of life. Pope's poetry is not as true an imitation of life as Shakespeare's. Nor is Zola's prose, for all its fidelity, as close an imitation of life as Victor Hugo's. Poetry without romance, without liberation, can

rise above the second order. The poet must be faithful not only to his subject, but to his soul. Poe defined art as the "reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul," and this, though like most definitions of art, incomplete, is true in so far as it reminds us that art at its greatest is the statement of a personal and ideal vision. That is why the reverence of rules in the arts is so dangerous. It puts the standards of poetry not in the hands of the poet, but in the hands of the grammarians. It is a Procrustes' bed which mutilates the poet's vision. Luckily, England has always been a rather lawless country, and we find even Pope insisting that "to judge . . . of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another." Dennis might cry: "Poetry is either an art or whimsy and fanaticism. . . . The great design of the arts is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, by restoring order." But, on the whole, the English poets and critics have realized the truth that it is not an order imposed from without, but an order imposed from within at which the poet must aim. He aims at bringing order into chaos, but that does not mean that he aims at bringing Aristotle into chaos. He is, in a sense, "beyond good and evil," so far as the orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in a nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who condemned Shakespeare as "a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters," lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form." And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another sentence in the same lecture:

As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes its genius-the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Mr. Cowl enables us to follow, as in no other book I know, the endless quarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit and the letter, among the English authorities on poetry. It is a quarrel which will obviously never be finally settled in any country. The mechanical theory is a necessary reaction against romance that has decayed into windiness, extravagance, and incoherence. It brings the poets back to literature again. The romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminder that the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision. It brings the poets back to nature again. No one but a Dennis will hesitate an instant in deciding which of the theories is the more importantly and eternally true.