continually emotional, even if the emotion is only boredom, which, by the way, is rather a favorite theme with modern poets. We see things happening to others; we feel things happening to ourselves. Poetry, by virtue of its emotional point of view, is therefore peculiarly truthful about human truth; and we are all of us living poetry so long as we are vividly alive.

But there is one objection so apparently reasonable that it needs rather to be explained than to be denied. If poetry thus tells the very truth of our lives as we live them, why, then, does it not deal concretely with the actualities of our daily lives, with the railroad and the factory, with the street and the office, with gasolene and steam and electricity, instead of dwelling upon fabulous joys and old, unhappy, far-off things? Why not express our feelings in terms of contemporary detail? In a word, if poetry is real, why is it not realistic? The first answer must be that in greater measure than we suppose it is so; about half the poems even of our modern making are wholly realistic in imagery. But these deal with details forever old and new, contemporary to all times. And that suggests the complete answer to the question. In no art is it possible to tell the truth and to state the facts alike precisely. We can paint a mountain or a cathedral in the distance, but not close at hand. Grass in the sunshine is actually green; but we must paint it more or less yellow, or there will be no sunshine in the picture. Just so we can express the emotion of riding a horse in terms of bridle and stirrup and spur. We cannot express in terms of handle-bar and pedal and accelerator the emotion of riding a motor-cycle. The conquest of the air is as great a wonder as ever was the conquest of the sea, but we cannot yet evoke the poetry of it by reference to the parts of the machine; and there was once a prehistoric time when sail and oar and rudder were too recent to connote the veritable mystery of ocean. It is not that modern life is unpoetic or that modern poets miss its meaning, but that in any age things must have grown already very old before the emotional sense of them soaks into and impregnates their visible forms and the words which are their names. We must imagine the angel of the last day summoning with the ancient trumpet, not with the modern megaphone, not because the one idea is a whit less poetical than the other, but because the one symbol tells the very truth, which the other blasphemes. Here is no question of selecting or falsifying the subject, but only of a plain limitation in the expressive medium. Poetry is concrete emotion in words; and as to words and facts, the proverb is reversed, and it is unfamiliarity which breeds contempt. We must still speak of the sword in order to speak truly of modern war; and if you intend a sincere benediction, you cannot say “God bless our apartment!" You will not be saying what you mean unless you call it house or home.

But there is another and more positive reason why poetry often speaks the more truth for translating fact into parable and telling of you and me under changed names. That sensitive and private verity of our lives which is the special province of poetry to express we cannot in ordinary intercourse express at all. Nor would we do so if we could. Even among those most near to us we hint at rather than elucidate our feelings: we love and pray and aspire in secret and in silence; or if in public, then formally and through some interpreter who speaks impersonally for all. There is in these matters a decency of the soul as general as the propriety of the person, a wholly noble shame which forbids us to babble intimacies of beauty and holiness; and the heart upon the sleeve is justly deemed either heartless or insincere. We like to think this a special virtue of our own race; but so did and so do most of the races upon earth. It is at least as old and as universal as poetry itself. It was a French poet who wrote, "The lips keep silence that the heart may speak,” and the Greek word for "holiness" is "mystery." Now, poetry, because it is an art, because the poet appears not in his proper person, but as the impersonal interpreter and spokesman of personality, is the one medium wherein the heart speaks unashamed precisely as the priest may ex cathedra speak forbidden words and without profanation handle sacred things. Precisely as the nude in painting or sculpture is wholly decorous because impersonal, so in poetry we look upon the revealed and unveiled images of our souls; and in both alike it is the translation into art which by removing realism removes offense. Neither the poet himself nor any other man of us could actually say to any woman,

I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honor more,

first, because no one could word it so well, and, secondly, because the better it was said, the more it would sound priggish and rhapsodical. Yet the idea is wholly human and dignified and true: every pure lover and brave wife has felt so. And Lovelace has perfectly spoken for them all, without falsehood and without reproach.

Poetry has long been called the language of emotion. And this old phrase, well understood, implies whatever we have here considered; for to each one who lives, life means emotion, and emotion means actual experience. Poetry is our traditional and only means of telling how we really feel about things: directly, when the object of our feeling is either old or ageless; or when the object is too new to mean to others what it means to each, then indirectly by so distilling fact into fancy that the essential truth may be retained. No two young lovers ever talked to each other like Romeo and Juliet. There they sit yonder, in the flesh; and if you had a transcript of their actual conversation, you would find it silly and absurd, almost

as false, perhaps, as an account of their adventure in scientific terms. It is Shakspere who has told the truth, after all. The dry, intense creature over there is called Psyche. She studied among the Amazons, poor girl, and turned the lamp of ultraviolet learning upon Eros; and now she has far to go before she finds him. To-morrow you will see Jason going down to his office to win the Golden Fleece; he will make an ambitious marriage with Medea, who will murder his children when he tires of her. Tristram emerges from the club, with an eye to Mark and Iseult turning the corner in their limousine. Roland and Diomed and Marmion are fighting for their lives in France; and Odysseus was here the other day to see our cities and our men. All this is no fantasy, but the plain truth about these people, told in the simplest way. And if you feel any doubt about it, you are forgetting how you yourself as a girl waited at the window for Leander, or as a bridegroom went through the fire to Brunhild.

And the uses of all this? Two beyond peradventure, and in addition to that purely artistic pleasure in truth and beauty which we already recognize. Poetry, being what it is, the record of how it feels to be alive, constitutes our whole inheritance of mutual understanding, our library of human nature, our tradition of all that personal experience in this world which we now hold in common, and whereby we know our neighbor and ourselves. That old comparison of laws and songs is not so antithetical, after all. For just as the law keeps for our civilization a code or body of social conduct, in every age deeply studied by a few, by a few more increased or altered, and held from age to age as a common wisdom by which we half unconsciously direct and civilize our lives, so poetry hands down to each new generation an older and more general code of emotional experience, a history of the heart of man not only for the few who read at first hand, but so transfusing and impregnating our whole memory and sense of being that language itself passes current upon the hidden gold of our poetic treasury, and we compare our motives and our passions by reference to forgotten dreams. If poetry could be in an instant swept not merely out of print, but out of language and tradition, there would be Babel indeed. We should go about isolated each one from each by a chaos of misunderstanding, with no more communication than we could improvise out of intellectual terms. We could suggest nothing, connote nothing, say nothing but what we could define. The practical reality of that loss one may measure by our proverbial ignorance of certain savages and Oriental races whose poetry is alien to our own. Nor is that all; for poetry is not alone our common repository of past experience, but to a degree far greater than we realize our source of present action. There is no need more than to remind any observer of human nature that mankind acts rather upon passion

than upon conviction. Brutus demonstrated his point in prose; it was a poetic appeal that made the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny. We define and determine and decide, and still do nothing; but when we begin to feel, something is done. Though we steer by learning and intelligence, yet emotion must fill the sail. Or, in another figure, action is the bullet and passion the powder; and he who thinks to achieve any practical affair by sheer intellect shoots with an empty gun. There is no blinder folly than the present fashion of using the word sentimental as a term of reproach, and decrying the impulse or incentive of sentiment. The one efficient motive is emotion; the only good reason for doing is a sentimental reason. Dickens the sentimentalist led his reforms, and Rousseau the sentimentalist aroused his revolution; and we are still awaiting actual results from Marcus Aurelius and Mr. Bernard Shaw.

This is that real use and value of poetry which many times and peoples have remembered, and which our rather detached and selfconscious appreciation of the arts tends momentarily to forget. The esthetic delight in pregnant numbers and poignant imagery they felt perhaps not less than we; but they felt also, and as a matter of course, that poetry alone can put our personal feeling into words, and that poetry alone can turn words into deeds. They realize, more easily than our complex and inventive environment permits us to realize, that the material forms and names of any age matter little except for what they mean to us; for the facts of life change and falsify and pass utterly away, but the truth is poetry and shall prevail.

Christmas at Pont-à-Mousson

By EMORY POTTLE

Author of "The Truth-Tellers," Etc.

Illustrations by J. Paul Verrees