Poetry in General and in Particular

THEBE is no brief maxim so incontrovertible as that poeta nascitur, non fit; but we suspect the force of the maxim is weakened by an insistence upon the second member of the phrase. It is the spontaneity of poetry which is its essential quality ; the ever fresh miracle of poetic efflorescence obeys, doubtless, some spiritual law, but to the common mind transcends law. There is an uneasy sense that a school of poetry is a contradiction in terms, and that as a school of the prophets intimates an evaporation of prophecy, so the moment we seek to reduce poetry to a system of laws we have suffered the essential quality to escape. If all this were designed to make poets, the apprehension might have some foundation, but in truth we may almost say that lector fit, non nascitur ; for, however one may be more sensitive than another in response to poetry, the cultivation of a taste for poetry certainly is possible, and a very great service is done when one gives hints of that higher freedom in poetry which moves along the lines of necessary law, so that the reader is not at the beck of his own caprice, nor led astray by the vagrant whims of a lawless poetic magic. Such a service is rendered by Mr. Stedman in the book which contains the first series of lectures delivered upon the new and important foundation at Johns Hopkins University of the Percy Trumbull Memorial Lectureship of Poetry.¹ Mr. Stedman well says, in his Introduction, that in poetry ” the simplest laws and constitutents, those most patent to common apprehension, are also the most profound and abiding: ” and he justifies his right to seek for the very nature and elements of poetry by discarding in advance the treacherous notion that a great work loses its power as time goes on. In truth, there is nothing more enduring than great poetry, and no subject of human endeavor offers a fairer field to the philosophic inquirer after fundamental laws of the spirit. The reason for this is evident when one considers the enormous advantage which poetry has over the fictile arts in the fact that the instrument which poetry uses is, in its lowest terms, common to all who attend it; but although every one has thought and speech, not every one has thought and the art, even rudely, of expression through line and form.

It is for this reason, also, that there are so many futile attempts at poetic expression, and another service which Mr. Stedman renders is in steadily presenting poetry in its large and universal forms, so that he furnishes not petty measures, but great principles by which to try the spirit; for many false poets are gone out into the world. It is not enough to recognize in general terms the worth and dignity of poetry, but one needs to make such spectrum analysis as will disclose those elements of beauty, truth, imagination, passion, insight, genius, and faith, which make up the glory of the whole ; and as this book is an inspiration to the genuine lover and to the creator of poetry, so it offers no superficial tests to the idle reader of verse, nor mechanical guide to the wouldbe manufacturer. It would be a most wholesome exercise for those young students of either sex who are tempted to write poetry if they would first make a survey of the subject by means of this treatise, to see how a poet who has made a study of poetry speaks of his art not only in its nature, but through the exponents of the art in all time.

Yet, after all, the volume, as we have intimated, belongs most to the readers of poetry, and it will do much, wherever it is attentively studied, to deepen one’s sense of that connection between poetry and life which is the finest result of criticism. To note how, in every age, that which is enduring in human experience and aspiration has found expression in an art, and how the human voice which has thus sung has been free in its range, yet obedient to laws which it has discerned, not made ; that personality, when it is strongest, still owns a larger, comprehensive spirit, and is not a mere caprice of intelligence, is to enter into that noble delight in poetry which is at once the inspiration of the reader and the stern discouragement of the trifler with this divine art. It is the virtue of Mr. Stedman’s book that it does not stray from this great purpose, and yet in the most friendly manner leads the reader through the range of poetic performance, so that principle is constantly illustrated by example, and example suggests principle.

It is with no change of venue that one comes to the specific inquiry into the laws governing Greek poetry, under the guidance of Professor Jebb.² In the brief introduction which serves to connect the Hellenic life with that which antedates it, Mr. Jebb strikes at once the keynote of the race, and reveals the secret of the preeminence which attaches to Greek poetry as to Greek sculpture, when he says: “ Now leave the monuments of the Egyptian temple or the Assyrian palace, and turn to the pages of the Iliad and the Odyssey. At once we are in the open air, and in the sunshine of a natural life. The human faculties have free play in word and deed. All the movement, all the beauty and the joy of the outward world are observed with a spontaneous freshness of interest and delight. . . . Achilles, . . . Andromache, . . . Nausicaa, . . . Odysseus and Penelope, — these are creations that have held the world ever since with a charm which, so far as we know, they first revealed, — the charm of truth to nature, united with an artistic sense of what is beautiful and pathetic in human life. The Hellene may not have been the first of mankind who felt these things, but he was the first who, feeling them, was able to express them.”

Mr. Jebb’s task is to show how the development of Greek poetry kept pace with the development of Greek life, and his study leads him more or less directly into the interesting inquiry how far poetry at any one time is an evolution from earlier forms, and what the force of individuality may be. He maintains, with much clearness of judgment, that a marked distinction exists between Greek poetry and English in this matter of a direct relation between the growth of poetry and the development of life. Literary development can be traced, he holds, in English poetry from Spenser to Wordsworth, to the causes which connect it with the intellectual progress of the nation, but is not, as in Greek literature, a “ spontaneous and continuous expression of national life.” He sees in the successive epic, lyric, and dramatic expression of Greek poetry a normal growth coincident with phases of Hellenic progress in civilization. We are not sure that this distinction may not be due in part to the great advantage which the position of the student gives him in one case over the other. Hellenic civilization in the five hundred years covered in this study unquestionably is more composed for us than is English civil progress in the shorter period between Spenser and Wordsworth. The notion of entirety is more readily grasped, and the points which mark progress are more clearly perceived, because of the obscurity which veils multitudes of details; whereas the student, looking back over English history, not only gets a less objective view of it, but has to make a deliberate selection of salient points, and never feels quite sure that his generalizations may not be strongly affected by his own personality. Yet it remains that the individualism of modern life has broken up the masses of literature, so to speak ; each voice is more expressive of a single self, and one has to discover a pervading harmony by a species of composite phonology. In Greece, the process of nature appears to have been through the precipitation of a vaporous poetry residing in religion, in myth, and in folk-lore into a human voice speaking through Homer or Pindar or Æschylus with such consummate and satisfying art as to render idle and unnecessary any secondary forms.

There are many interesting questions started in the course of Mr. Jebb’s treatment of his great theme, but the reader will, after all, take his greatest pleasure in putting himself alongside the author and appropriating the fine spirit in which Greek poetry is viewed. The sureness of movement in the progress from the early epos to the late drama is that of one whose knowledge is held generously, and not in academic measure. It is noticeable that though, especially in the last chapter, Mr. Jebb discloses a familiarity with English poetry which enables him to draw comparisons with Greek forms, there is no suggestion of reading one by the light of the other. Both are referred, in his mind, to a common source in nature, and in each case it is a definite knowledge which permits him to take delight in the thing itself, independent of the intellectual pleasure which springs from the exercise of analysis. This, we think, is the really important contribution which Mr. Jebb makes to the interpretation of Greek poetry. It is itself hardly susceptible of analysis, only of statement; but it is communicated to the generous reader who takes the book simply and freely, and its tendency is to make one eager to read the poetry discussed, and to acquire for himself that mellow mind which is so well expressed by Keats in one of his letters when he says: “ I had an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner; let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, . . . and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it, until it becomes stale — but when will it be so ? Never ! When man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect, any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all the ‘ two and thirty Palaces.’ ”