THE BALLAD - THE EPIC-THE DRAMA 79

late creative

be as a vacuum, so to be filled by the universe. Then the universe will fill me, and pour out again." Which dark saying I interpret here as an emblem of the receptivity of the artist to life at large. This it is his function to give out again, illumined, but unadulterate. The story is told, the song chanted, the drama constructed, with the simplest of understandings between audience and maker: as between children at their play, artisans at their handicraft, recounter and hearers around the desert fire. Every literature has more or less of this free, absolute poetry. But only in the drama, and at Early and distinctively imaginative periods, have eras. poets of the Christian era been quite objective; not even there and then, without in most cases having "unlocked" their hearts by expression of personal feeling. This process exemplified in the sonnets of Shakespeare, and in the minor works. of Dante, Tasso, Cervantes, Calderon, Camoëns — rarely suggested itself to the antique poets, whose verses were composed for the immediate verdict of audiences great or small, and in the Attic period distinctly as works of art, necessarily universal, and not introspective. Nor would much self-intrusion then have been tolerated. Imagine the Homeric laughter of an Athenian conclave, every man of them with something of Aristophanes in him, at being summoned to listen to the sonnetary sorrows of a blighted lover! There were few Werthers in those days. Bad poets, and bores of all sorts, were

II.

not likely to flourish in a society where ostracism, the custody of the Eleven, and the draught of hemlock were looked upon as rather mild and exemplary modes of criticism.

The subjective
poet.

Specialists.

Now, in distinction from unsophisticated and creative song, comes the voice of the poet absorbed in his own emotions and dependent on self-analysis for his knowledge of life. Here is your typical modern minor poet. But here also are some of the truest "bards of passion and of pain" that the world has known. Again, there are those who are free from the Parnassian egoism, but whose manner is so pronounced that every word they utter bears its author's stamp: their tone and style are unmistakable. Finally, many are confined implacably to certain limits. One cares. for beauty alone, an artist pure and simple; another is a balladist; a third is gifted with philosophic insight of nature; still another has a genius for the psychological analysis of life. Each of these appears to less advantage outside his natural range. The vision of all these classes is conditioned. An obvious limitation of the speechless arts is that they can be termed subjective only with respect to motive and style. We expression. have the natural landscapist, and the figure-painter, while nearly all good painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, are recognizable, as you know, by their respective styles, but otherwise all arts, save those of language, are relatively impersonal and objective.

Language the
freest means
of self-

CONDITIONED VOICES

81

The highest faculties of vision and execution are required to design an absolutely objective poem, and to insure its greatness. There is no middle ground; it is great, or else a dull and perfunctory mechanism. The force of the heroic epics, whose authorship is in the crypt of the past, seems to be not that of a single soul, but of a people; not that of a generation, but of a round of eras. Yet the final determination of poetic utterance is toward self-expression. The minstrel's soul uses for its medium that slave of imaginative feeling, language. It is a voice voice; and the emotion of its possessor will not be denied. The poet is the Mariner, whose heart burns within him until his tale is told:

"I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,

I know the man that must hear me :
To him my tale I teach."

a

Races themselves have a bent toward one of the

two generic types, so that with one nation.

Racial tendency.

or people the creative poet is the exception, and with another the rule. The Asiatic inspiration, even in its narrative legacies, is more subjectively vague than that which we call the antiquethat of the Hellenes. But the extreme Asia. Eastern field requires special study, and is beyond the limits of this course, so that I will only confess my belief that much of our fashionable adaptation

Attempts to transfer the

Buddhist con

of Hindu, Chinese, Japanese literatures represents more honestly the ethics and poetic spirit of its Western students than the Oriental feeling and conceptions; that it is a latterceptions. day illumination of Brahmanic esoterics rather than the absolute Light of Asia, whether better or worse, not a veritable transfer, but the ideal of Christendom grafted on the Buddhist stock. It is doubtful, in fact, whether the Buddhists themselves fully comprehend their own antiquities; and if our learned virtuosos, from Voltaire and Sir William Jones to Sir Edwin Arnold, fail to do so, they nevertheless have found the material for a good deal of interesting verse. It will be a real exploit when some one does for the Buddhist epos and legendary what John Payne and Captain Burton have done for the Arabic "Thousand Nights and One Night." Then we shall at least know those literatures as they are; nor will it be strange if they prove to be, in some wise, as much superior to our conception of them as Payne's rendering of the "Arabian Nights" is to that of Galland, or as Butcher and Lang's prose translation of Homer is to Lord Derby's verse. Of such a paraphrase as Fitzgerald's "Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám," one at once declares, in Landor's phrase, that it is more original than the originals: the Western genius in this instance has produced an abiding poem, unique in its interfusion of the Persian and the neo-English dispositions.

But with Hebrew poetry, that of the Bible, we

THE ASIATIC INSPIRATION

83

have more to do, since we derive very closely from it. There is no literature at once so grand and so familiar to us. Its inherent, racial The Hebraic genius was emotional and therefore lyrical genius. (though I am not with those who deem all lyrical poetry subjective), and a genius of so fiery and prophetic a cast that its personal outbursts have a loftiness beyond those of any other literature. The Hebrew was, and the orthodox Israelite remains, a magnificent egoist. Himself, his past, and his future, are a passion. But-and this is what redeems his egoism—they are not his deepest passion; he has an intenser emotion concerning his own race, the chosen people, a more fervent devotion to Jehovah, his own Jehovah, if not the God of a universe. Waiving the question whether the ancient Jew was a monotheist, we know that he trusted in the might of his own God as overwhelmingly superior to that of all rivals. His God, moreover, was a very human one. But the Judaic anthropomorphism was of the most transcendent type that ever hath entered into the heart of man.

exaltation.

I do not, then, class the Hebrew poetry, which, though lyrical, gives vent not so much to Its national the self-consciousness of the psalmist or prophet or chieftain as to the pride and rapture of his people, with that which is personal and relative, any more than I would count the winged Pindar in his splendid national odes, or even his patriotic Grecian followers, as strictly subjective, however lyrical