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an injunction which finds a ready echo in the hearts of all who are responsible for the maintenance and care of golf-links; namely, "Never, when you have cut out a portion of turf in the act of playing, omit to replace it." Finally, the present humble writer would venture to throw in, as a fifth admonition: "Don't

drive at a fellow-creature, so long as there is a reasonable chance of your hitting him."

May all who shall have had the patience to read these remarks have the patience likewise to act upon the sage precepts contained in the foregoing paragraph! So shall they develop into good golfers, live long, and prosper.

W. E. Norris.

THE NATURE AND ELEMENTS OF POETRY.
VI. TRUTH.

Fall natural things make for beauty, if the statement is well founded that they are as beautiful as they can be under their conditions, then truth and beauty, in the last reduction, are equivalent terms, and beauty is the unveiled shining countenance of truth. But a given truth, to be beautiful, must be complete. Tennyson's line,

and temporal, not of essential and infinite, relations. We therefore detest didactic verse, because, though made by well-intentioned people, it is tediously incomplete and false.

POETS will interpret nature truthfully, within their liberties; they do not assume to be on as close terms with her, or with her Creator, as some of the teachers and preachers. They are content to find the grass yet bent where she has passed, the bough still swaying which

A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest she brushed against. They feel that of lies,

will bear inversion. Truth which is half a lie is intolerable. A certain kind of preachment, antipathetic to the spirit of poesy, has received the name of didacticism. Instinct tells us that it is a heresy in any form of art. Yet many persons, after being assured by Keats that the unity of beauty and truth is all we know or need to know, are perplexed to find sententious statements of undisputed facts so commonplace and odious. Note, meanwhile, that Keats's assertion illustrates itself by injuring the otherwise perfect poem which contains it. So obtrusive a moral lessens the effect of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In other words, the beauty of the poem would be truer without it. Now, why does a bit of didacticism take the life out of song, and didactic verse proclaim its maker a proser and not a poet? Because pedagogic formulas of truth do not convey its essence. They preach, as I have said elsewhere, the gospel of half-truths, uttered by those who have not the insight to perceive the soul of truth, the expression of which is always beauty. This soul is found in the relations of things to the universal, and its correct expression is beautiful and inspiring.

What Nature for her poets hides

'T is wiser to divine than clutch.

The imaginative poets, who read without effort the truth of things, have been more faithful in even their passing transcripts of nature and life than many who conscientiously attempt a portrayal. Where they make comments, it is as if by anticipation of the reader; it is not so much their own conclusion as that of the observing world. The truth, moreover, is less in the comment than in the poetry,― is rather in the song than in the obbligato. With the epic or dramatic poet the motive is not truth of description, but truth of life. Yet how much surer the scenic touches of the best narrative and drama than the word-painting of the so-called descriptive poets! Compare the sudden landscape, the life of its populous under-world, the sky and water, the sunlight and moonlight and storm, in "A Winter's Tale " and " Midsummer Night's Dream," with the prolonged and pious descriptions in Thomson's "Seasons." In the dramas the scenic truth is incidental, yet almost incomparable for beauty; in the descriptive poem it is elaborate and tame. You are comparing, to be sure, the greatest of poets with one relatively humble, but the latter is on his chosen ground, and gives his whole mind to his business. Something more than sincerity Copyright, 1892, by Edmund Clarence Stedman.

While the beautiful expresses all these relations, the didactic at the best is the expression of one or more of them,- often of arbitrary

and knowledge, then, is needed for the expression of truth. Superadd noble contemplation and the anointed vision that reads the life of nature, and you have Wordsworth, a poet and painter indeed. In his greater moods he assuredly sets us face to face with unadulterate truth. Even Wordsworth does this less effectively, by his premeditated interpretation, than certain bards whose side-glimpses of the outdoor world we interpret for ourselves. Their chance strokes are matchless. The classic isles and waters are all before us in the" Odyssey," characterized broadly and truthfully by essential traits. Attica glows and glooms in the choruses of "Edipus at Colonos" and "The Clouds "; we have the atmosphere that suffuses her landscape, action, personages. Its tone is just as capturable now, as two thousand years ago under the sky of Sophocles and Aristophanes. The phonograph passes no more intelligibly to after time the living voice of a Gladstone or a Browning. Rarely is there an avowedly descriptive poet who achieves much more than the asking you to take his word for a mass of details. To come near home, this was what such American landscapists as Street and Percival usually succeeded in doing; while Lowell, with his quick eye and Greek good fellowship with nature, always keeps us in mind of her as a blithe companion by his side when he chats to us, and whether on the rocks of Appledore, or under the willows, or along the snow-paths of a white New England night. Cowper got nearer to truth than Thomson; he pointed to the naturalness that Wordsworth sought in turn- and found. As for Burns, he lay in nature's heart, and—whether with or without design-expressed her as simply and surely as the bards of old.

Of both truth to life and truth to physical nature there are two poetic exhibits: the first, broad; the second, minute and analytic. The greater the poet, the simpler and larger his statement, however fine in detail when need be. Seeking that presentment of human character and experience which is universal, we go to the poets and idylists of the Bible, to Homer and the Attic dramatists, to Cervantes and Shakspere, to Molière, and to the great novelists of the modern age. In poetry life has never been treated at once with so much intensity and truth, by many contemporaries, as in the Elizabethan period. This was inevitable. Our early dramatists wrote for instant stage production; their poetic text was of much import in default of the perfected acting and accessories which now render the text less essential-in fact, far too subordinate. In such "effects" as the stage production then made practicable, Shakspere and his group have not been excelled. But life

-truth of life and character-then was all in all; a false transcript was instantly detected; the dramatic poet, however exuberant, founded his work in unflinching realism. Situations and trivial sentiment now make the playwright, and even Tennyson and Browning have been unable to restore the muse conspicuously to the stage. The laureate's genius, to be sure, is the reverse of dramatic. Browning had the requisite passion and dramatic instinct; life and motive engrossed him beyond all else. But contrast the bold, direct Elizabethan characters with Browning's personages-whose thought and action are analyzed by him to the remotest detail. His drama is unique, but not in the free and instant spirit of poetry; it is not so much life as biology. The distinction recalls that tradition of the Massachusetts bar. Webster and Choate often were opposed in leading cases. The former brought his power and learning to bear upon the main issue of a case, and brushed aside the inessentials. Choate delighted to follow every trail to the uttermost, and in a manner as analytic as that of "The Ring and the Book." The jurors marveled at Choate's intellectual dexterity and glitter, but Webster usually won the verdict. The jury of an author is the reading world. In prose romance America puts forward a counterpart to BrowningMr. Henry James, except that he never sacrifices an imperturbable refinement of style; besides, with reference to his novels at least, he usually avoids, as if on principle, the concentrated passion and the dramatic situations that at times make Browning so impressive.

On the other hand, when Browning, the anatomist of human life, interests himself with side-glimpses of nature, he is full of simple truth, and with a sure instinct for essentials. His lyrics abound in these beautiful surprises. He forgets the laboratory when he touches landscape and outdoor life, and is all the artist. Nature has but one truer painter among the dramatists, and the best touches of both seem incidental. When Browning thinks of birds and beasts they suddenly, as in the Arabian Nights, become almost human. He reads the heart, one might say, of a bird, a horse, or a dog. This Tennyson does not do, nor does he usually give us vivid personal characters, admirably as he draws conventional types. His truth to nature is positive; he has the eye of a Thoreau, and the pastoral fidelity which befits one who is not only the pupil of Milton and Keats, but of Theocritus and Wordsworth. He can treat broadly, and imaginatively withal, "the leaguelong roller thundering on the reef" and "the long wash of Australasian seas"; but his frequent over-elaboration led the way to a main fault of the younger schools.

While a poet cannot be too accurate, his

method, to be natural, must seem unconscious. The virtue of a truth is spoiled by showing it off. Tennyson, the idylist, pauses at critical moments, not perhaps to moralize on the situation, but to make a picture suggesting the feeling which the action itself ought to convey. This practice, for a time so fascinating, has been carried to extremes. Now, in a class of his poems of which "Dora" is a fine example, he has shown that nothing can be more effective than a story simply told. A direct statement, through its truth, often has exceeding beauty-the beauty, pathetic or otherwise, of perfect naturalness. You find it everywhere in the Scriptures; for example:

neous, and that is everything. A city-bred poet is apt to strike false notes as soon as he hints at an intimacy with nature, and a false note is as quickly detected in poetry as in music, even by those who cannot sound the true one. As for truth to life-that depends on the poet's sympathetic perception. It was native to Burns; it was impossible with the self-absorbed Byron. Most poets, whether cockney or rustic, can draw only the types under their direct observation. Whitman's out-of-door poetry should be familiar to you. His admirers, including very authoritative judges at home and abroad, make almost every claim for him except that to which, in my opinion, he is entitled above other American poets. I know no

I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me; other who surpasses him as a word-painter of

and everywhere in Homer:

A thousand fires burned in the plain, and by the side of each sate fifty in the gleam of blazing fire.

A deep sleep fell upon his eyelids, a sound sleep,

very sweet, and most akin to death.

All genuine epics and ballads are charged with it, as in "The Children in the Wood":

No burial this pretty pair

Of any man receives,

Till Robin-redbreast piously

Did cover them with leaves.

nature. His eye is keen, his touch is accurate. No one depicts the American sky, ocean, forest, prairie, more characteristically or with a freer sense of atmosphere; no one is so inclusive of every object, living or inanimate, in the lie in his theory of unvarying realism. Nature's zones covered by our native land. His defects poet must adopt her own method; and she hides the processes that are unpleasant to see or consider. Whitman often dwells upon the under side of things, the decay, the ferment, the germination, which nature conducts in secret, though out of them she produces new life and beauty. Lanier, with equal fidelity, avoids a refined and spiritual genius needs

In the heroic vein, Arnold's " Sohrab and Rus- must avoid this irritating mistake. His taste tum" has a primitive directness:

made him an open critic of the robust poet of democracy: but it is manifest that the two (as near and as different as Valentine and Orson) were moving in the same direction; that is, His arms around his son's neck, and wept aloud, for an escape from conventional trammels to

So said he, and his voice released the heart
Of Rustum; and his tears broke forth; he cast

And kissed him. And awe fell on both the hosts
When they saw Rustum's grief.

something free, from hackneyed time-beats to an assimilation of nature's larger rhythm—to

The finest touch in Lady Barnard's ballad is limitless harmonies suggested by the voices of the simplest that of the line,

For auld Robin Gray is kind unto me. But I need not multiply such examples of the beauty of direct statement of unsophisticated truth. It is too rare a grace among the analytic and decorative poets.

WHEN We come to the reflective poetry of nature, the broad effects of Wordsworth and Bryant are both true and imaginative, and therefore excellent realism. For Nature does not differentiate her beauties; she combines them. It is hard to better the truth "by her own sweet and cunning hand put on." Bryant's successors-Whittier, Lowell, Whitman, Lanier, Taylor-have great fidelity to Nature. How can they help it, brought up in her own realm? Their touches are sponta

her winds and the diapason of her ocean billows. The later portion of Whitman's life-work, his symphonies of "starry night," of death. and immortality, have chords that would have thrilled Lanier profoundly.

In certain poems which have been humorously compared to "catalogues," Whitman supplies an example of the uselessness of a display of mere facts. Facts, despite Carlyle's eulogy upon them, are not "the one" and only "pabulum." They are the stones heaped about the mouth of the well in whose depth truth reflects the sky. I recall the words of Sir William Davenant, who wrote the feeblest of epics on a theory, yet preluded it with a chapter of noble prose wherein, among other fine discriminations, he says: "Truth, narrative and past, is the idol of historians (who worship a dead thing), and truth, operative and by its effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets,

who hath not her existence in matter but in reason." Realism, in the sense of natural ism, is the firm ground of art, but the poet is not a realist merely as concerns the things that are seen. He draws these as they are, but as they are or may be at their best. This lifts them out of the common, or, rather, it is thus we get at the "power and mystery of common things." His most audacious imaginings are within the felt possibilities of nature. But the use of poetry is to make us believe also in the impossible. Raphael said that he painted "that which ought to be." And Browning writes:

In the hall, six steps from us, One sees the twenty pictures there 's a life Better than life and yet no life at all. Lord Tennyson is reported as saying, with respect to certain contemporary writers: "Truth, as they understand it, is not the essential thing in poetry. For me verses have no other aim than to call to life nobler and better sentiments than we feel and express in every-day life. If they can suggest pictures worthy of an artist's eye, so much the better." Even the first English writer upon the topic - George Puttenham, whose "Arte of English Poesie" was published anonymously in the year 1589-said that "Arte is not only an aide and coadjutor to nature in all her actions, but an alterer of them, so as by meanes of it her owne effects shall appeare more beautiful or straunge and miraculous." And so there is nothing more lifeless, because nothing is more devoid of feeling and suggested movement, than servilely accurate imitation of nature. In every art a certain deviation from fact is not only justifiable, but required. Some things must be told or painted not as they are, but as they affect the eye or the imagination. The photograph reveals, indeed, the absolute position of the horse's legs at a given instant; by its aid the spokes of the revolving wheel are defined. Without doubt, art has learned most important facts through the photographic demonstration of actual processes; our animal- and figure-painters, our sculptors, can never repeat the absurd untruths which have become almost academic in the past. They will not, and need not, however, go to the other extreme. To the human eye, with its halting susceptibilities, the horse and the wheel do not appear exactly as when caught by Mr. Muybridge's camera, and the artist's office is to present them as they seem to us. In the prosaic photograph they are struck with death: the idea of life, of motion, can only be conveyed by blending the spokes of the wheel as they are blended to the human vision, and by giving a certain unreality of grace to the speeding animal. Otherwise, you have the fact, which is not art.

Thus every workman must be a realist in knowledge, an idealist for interpretation, and the antagonism between realists and romancers is a forced one; and when any one rules the poet out of debate, as of course a feigner, he is in error, for the same law applies to all the arts. The true inquiry concerns the quality of the writer, his power of expression, the limits of his character. For no small and limited nature can enter into great passions and experiences.

It is a fine thing for a poet to express the life, feeling, ideal, of his own people; by so doing, he betters his chance of commending himself to after times. This is what the Greeks did, but in our century we find poet after poet exercising his skill upon reproductions, working the Grecian myths and legends over and over again in pseudo-classical lyrics, idyls, and dramas. After Landor and Keats and Tennyson and Swinburne, our younger school cannot find a real need for this sort of thing. I remember my own chagrin, twenty years ago, when Mr. Lowell wrote a most judicious notice of one of my books, and failed to mention a blank-verse poem, with a classical theme, upon which I had expended the technical skill and imagery at my command. On the other hand, he was more than kind to my native, if homely, American lyrics and ballads, written with less pains, yet more spontaneously; and he told me very frankly that he thought the simple home-fruit of more real significance than my attempt to reproduce some apple of the Hesperides. He was right, and I have not forgotten the lesson. With respect to another art, I wonder that the American sculptor does not still more frequently make a diversion from his imitations of the medieval and the antique. What subjects he has close at hand — such as a Greek, if he now could chance upon them, would handle with eagerness and truth! Surely our American workman, at labor and in repose, our young athletes, our beasts of the forest and of the field, are available models; and Ward's "Indian Hunter," Donoghue's "The Boxer," and Tilden's "The Ball-Thrower," at least convey their suggestion of what should and will be done. There is a certain lack of sincerity, despite their artistic beauty, in the foreign and antique exploits of many poets and artists; and lack of sincerity is always lack of truth. But, while they should favor their own time, they must avoid expression of its transient passions and characteristics. Seize upon the essential, lasting traits, and let the others. be accessory. If the general spirit of the time be not embodied, a work is soon out of date.

Against all this, the widest freedom is permitted to that chartered libertine- the poet's im

agination. Nature and the soul being the same forever, we care nothing for Shakspere's anachronisms and impossible geography; we find nothing strange and impossible in his assembly of medieval fays and antique heroes and amazons, of English clowns and mechanics in Grecian garb, all commingled to enact a fantastic marvel of comedy and poesy in the palace and forests of a "Midsummer Night's Dream." We confess the poet's witchcraft, and ourselves are of the blithe company-denizens of an enchanted land, where everything has the truth of possibility. A conception is not vitiated by the most novel form it may assume, provided that this be artistic and not artificial. For art, as Goethe and Haydon have said, is art because it is not nature. That method is most true which, invoking the force of nature, directs it by its own device; just as, in mechanics, the screw-propeller is more than the equivalent of the fish's flukes or the bird's wing. Our delight in art proceeds from a knowledge that it is not inevitable, but designed; a human, not a natural, creation; the truth of nature's capabilities, seen by man's imagination, captured by the human hand, expressed and illumined when our Creator, intrusting his own wand to us, bids us test its power ourselves.

WHAT is called descriptive poetry never can be very satisfying, since the painter is so much more capable than the poet of transferring the visible effects of nature-those addressed to the eye. I suppose it is impossible for one not reared in England, and in that very part of England which lies between Derwentwater and the Wye, to comprehend thoroughly the truth and beauty of Wordsworth's pastoral note and landscape. Neither can a foreigner rightly estimate the American idylists; the New World scenery and atmosphere are so different from the European that they must be seen before their quality can be felt. Aside from this limitation, the poet expresses what he finds in nature, to wit, that which answers to his own needs and temper. Her interpretation has been, it may almost be said, a special function of the century now closing. Nature moved Coleridge to eloquence, rhapsody, worship, and, as an artist, to imaginative mysticism. Heine, Longfellow, Swinburne, have read the secret of the sea. To Landor, Emerson, and Lowell the tree is animate; in their presence the flower has rights: they would not fell the one nor pluck the other. But there were two English poets whose respective temperaments answered perfectly to the two conditions of nature embraced in Lord Bacon's profound observation, that "In nature things move violently to their place and calmly in their place." Byron's fitful genius was stirred by her violence of change. The VOL. XLIV.-81.

rolling surges, the tempest, the live thunder leaping from peak to peak, mated the restlessness of a spirit charged with their own intensity of motion and desire. Wordsworth felt the sublimity of the repose that lies on every height, of nature's ultimate subjection to law. His imagination comprehended her reserved forces; and before his time her deepest voice had no apt interpreter, for none had listened with an ear so patient as his for mastery of her language. His announcement that

He who feels contempt

For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used,

was like a revelation. That he had purged himself of all such baseness was his absolute conviction: in such matters he was a kind of Gladstone among the poets of his day. Therefore self-contemplation, or, to be more exact, the transcription of nature's effect upon himself, seemed to him a sane, even a sacred, vocation. In fact, a lofty, if not inventive, imagination, and

An eye made quiet by the power of harmony,

gave him for this faith a warrant which all his ponderous homiletics could not render null. As he let "the misty mountain winds" blow on him, he was nature's living oracle. And the world soon yielded to the force of that "pathetic fallacy" which has imparted to modern thought a distemper and a compensation: the refuge, be it real or illusionary, still left to us, and so compulsive that neither reason nor science can quite rid us of it when face to face with nature when soothed by the sweet influences of our mother Earth. It is true, in Landor's words, that

We are what suns and winds and waters make us; Fashion and win their nursling with their The mountains are our sponsors, and the rills

smiles.

But Ruskin avers that the illusion under which we fondly believe nature to be the sympathetic participator of our sentiment or passion, and which he terms the pathetic fallacy, is incompatible with a clear-seeing acceptance of the truth of things.

Now, that there is a solace a companionship — found in nature none can doubt. It is as old as the fable of Antæus. Primitive races feel it so strongly that they inform all natural objects with sentient individual lives; our more advanced intelligence conceives of a universal spirit that comprehends and soothes Earth's children. In our own youth, nature haunts us "like a passion": and as in the youth of a race, we "cannot paint what then we were," in mature years each of us can say,

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