Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/273

POETRY 263 breaks in upon his soul, Sophocles must have felt that, in the holiest chambers of sorrow and in the highest agonies of suffering reigns that awful silence which not poetry, but painting sometimes, and sculpture always, can render. What human sounds could render the agony of Niobe, or the agony of Laocoon, as we see them in the sculptor s rendering 1 Not articulate speech at all ; not words but wails. It is the same with hate ; it is the same with love. We are not speaking merely of the unpacking of the heart in which the angry warriors of the Iliad indulge. Even such subtle writing as that of ^Eschylus and Sophocles falls below the work of the painter. Hate, though voluble perhaps, as Clytsemnestra s when hate is at that red-heat glow which the poet can render, changes in a moment whenever that redness has been fanned to hatred s own last complexion whiteness as of iron at the melting- point, when the heart has grown far too big to be "unpacked" at all, and even the bitter epigrams of hate s own rhetoric, though brief as the terrier s snap before he fleshes his teeth, or as the short snarl of the tigress as she springs before her cubs in danger, are all too slow and sluggish for a soul to which language at its tensest has become idle play. But this is just what cannot be ren dered by an art whose medium consists solely of words. It is in giving voice, not to emotion at its tensest, but to the variations of emotion, it is in expressing the count less shifting movements of the soul from passion to passion, that poetry shows in spite of all her infirmities her superiority to the plastic arts. Hamlet and the Agamemnon, the Iliad and the (Edipus Ti/rannus, are adequate to the entire breadth and depth of man s soul. Ptic Poetic Imagination. We have now reached our last ir.giua- general inquiry What varieties of poetic art are the Lll> outcome of the two kinds of poetic impulse, dramatic imagination and lyric or egoistic imagination? It would of course be impossible within tue space at our command to examine fully the subject of poetic imagination. For in order to do so we should have to enter upon the vast question of the effect of artistic environment upon the development of man s poetic imagination; we should have to inquire how the instinctive methods of each poet and of each group of poets have been modified and often governed by the methods characteristic of their own time and country. We should have to inquire, for instance, how far such landscape as that of Sophocles in the (Edipus Coloneus and such landscape as that of Wordsworth depends upon difference of individual temperament, and how far Aistic upon difference of artistic environment. That, in any iron- thorough and exhaustive discussion of poetic imagina tion, the question of artistic environment must be taken into account, the case of the Iliad is alone sufficient to show a case that will at once occur to the reader. Ages before Phrynichus, ages before an acted drama was dreamed of, a dramatic poet of the first order arose, and, though he was obliged to express his splendid dramatic imagination through epic forms, he expressed it almost as fully as if he had inherited the method and the stage of Sophocles. And if Homer never lived at all, then an entire group of dramatic poets arose in remote times whose method was epic instead of dramatic simply be cause there was then no stage. This, contrasted with the fact that in a single half- century the tragic art of Greece arose with yEschylus, culminated with Sophocles, and decayed with Euripides, and contrasted also with the fact that in England at one time, and in Spain at one time, almost the entire poetic imagination of the country found expression in the acted drama alone, is sufficient to show that a poet s artistic methods are very largely influenced by the artistic environ ments of his country and time. So vast a subject as this, however, is, as we say, quite beyond the scope of any essay like this, and we can only point to the familiar instance of the troubadours and the trouveres and then pass on. With the trouvere (the poet of the langue d oil), the story or situation is always the end of which the musical language is the means; with the troubadour (the poet of the langue d oc), the form is so beloved, the musical language so enthralling, that, however beautiful may be the story or situation, it is felt to be no more than the means to a more beloved and beautiful end. But then nature makes her own troubadours and her own trouveres irrespective of fashion and of time irrespective of langue d oc and langue d o il. And, in comparing the trouba dours with the trouveres, this is what strikes us at once there are certain troubadours who by temperament, by original endowment of nature, ought to have been trou veres, and there are certain trouveres who by temperament ought to have been troubadours. Surrounding conditions alone have made them what they are. There are those whose impulse (though writing in obedience to contem porary fashions lyrics in the langue d oc) is manifestly to narrate, and there are those whose impulse (though writing in obedience to contemporary fashions fabliaux in the langue d o il) is simply to sing. In other words, there are those who, though writing after the fashion of their brother-troubadours, are more impressed with the romance and wonderfulness of the human life outside them than with the romance and wonderfulness of their own passions, and who delight in depicting the external world in any form that may be the popular form of their time; and there are those who, though writing after the fashion of their brother-trouveres, are far more occupied with the life within them than with that outer life which the taste of their time and country calls upon them to paint born rhythmists who must sing, who translate everything external as well as internal into verbal melody. Of the former class Pierre Vidal, of the latter class the author of " Le Lay de 1 Oiselet," may be taken as the respective types. That the same forces are seen at work in all literatures few students of poetry will deny, though in some poetical groups these forces are no doubt more potent than in others, as, for instance, with the great parable poets of Persia, in some of whom there is perpetually apparent a conflict between the dominance of the Oriental taste for allegory and subtle suggestion, as expressed in the Zoro- astrian definition of poetry, "apparent pictures of un- apparent realities, " and the opposite yearning to represent human life with the freshness and natural freedom charac teristic of Western poetry. Allowing, however, for all the potency of external All poetry influences, we shall not be wrong in saying that of poetic the out- imagination there are two distinct kinds (1) the kind of c m( ? * 5 . ... j.T.-T.j.-Tnii absolute poetic imagination seen at its highest in ^Eschylus, v i s j ou or Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Homer, and (2) the kind of of relative poetic imagination seen at its highest in Pindar, Dante, vision, and Milton, or else in Sappho, Heine, and Shelley. The former, being in its highest dramatic exercise uncondi tioned by the personal or lyrical impulse of the poet, might perhaps be called absolute dramatic vision; the latter, being more or less conditioned by the personal or lyrical impulse of the poet, might be called relative dramatic vision. It seems impossible to classify poets, or to classify the different varieties of poetry, without drawing some such distinction as this, whatever words of definition we may choose to adopt. For the achievement of all pure lyric poetry, such as the ode, the song, the elegy, the idyl, the sonnet, the stornello, it is evident that the imaginative force we have called relative vision will suffice. And if we consider the matter

thoroughly, in many other forms of poetic art forms