Arthur Quiller-Couch

"Trust in good verses then:

They only shall aspire,

When pyramids, as men

Are lost i'the funeral fire."

As the tale is told by Plato, in the tenth book of his Republic, one Er the son of Arminius, a Pamphylian, was slain in battle; and ten days afterwards, when they collected the bodies for burial, his body alone showed no taint of corruption. His relatives, however, bore it off to the funeral pile; and on the twelfth day, lying there, he returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world. Many wonders he related concerning the dead, for example, with their rewards and punishments: but most wonderful of all was the great Spindle of Necessity which he saw reaching up into heaven with the planets revolving around it in whorls of graduated width and speed, yet all concentric and so timed that all complete the full circle punctually together.—"The Spindle turns on the knees of Necessity: and on the rim of each whorl sits perched a Siren, who goes round with it, hymning a single note; the eight notes together forming one harmony."

The fable is a pretty one: but Er the Pamphylian comes back to report no more than the one thing Man already grasps for a certainty amid his welter of guesswork about the Universe—that its stability rests on ordered motion—that the "firmament" stands firm on a balance of active and tremendous forces somehow harmoniously composed. Theology asks "By whom?": Philosophy inclines rather to guess "How?" Natural Science, allowing that these questions are probably unanswerable, contents itself with mapping and measuring what it can of the various forces. But all agree about the harmony: and when a Newton discovers a single rule of it for us, he but makes our assurance surer.

For uncounted centuries before ever hearing of "Gravitation" men knew of the sun that he rose and set at hours which, though mysteriously appointed, could be accurately predicted; of the moon that she regularly waxed and waned, drawing the waters of the earth in a flow and ebb, the gauge of which and the time-table could be advertised beforehand in the almanack; of the stars, that they swung as by clockwork around the pole. Says the son of Sirach concerning them—

At the word of the Holy one they will stand in due order, And they will not faint in their watches.

So evident is this celestial harmony that men, seeking to account for it by what was most harmonious in themselves or in their experience, supposed an actual Music of the Spheres inaudible to mortals; Plato (who learned of Pythagoras) inventing his Octave of Sirens, spinning in the whorls of the great planets and intoning as they spin; Chaucer (who learned of Dante and makes the spheres nine) in his Parliament of Foules telling, out of Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, how the great Scipio Africanus visited his descendant in a dream and—

Shewed he him the litel erthe, that heer is, In regard of the hevenes quantité: And after shewed he him the nynè sperés, And after that the melodye herde he That cometh of thilke sperés thryés-three That welle is of musicke and melodye In this world heer, and cause of armonye.

While Shakespeare in the last Act of The Merchant of Venice makes all the stars vocal, and not the planets only:

There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims...

And Milton in Arcades goes straight back to Plato (save that his spheres are nine, as with Chaucer):

then listen I To the celestial Sirens' harmony That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres And sing to those that hold the vital shears And turn the adamantine spindle round Of which the fate of gods and men is wound. Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie To lull the daughters of Necessity, And keep unsteady Nature to her law, And the low world in measured motion draw After the heavenly tune.

From the greater poets let us turn to a lesser one, whom we shall have occasion to quote again by and by: to the Orchestra of Sir John Davies (1596), who sees this whole Universe treading the harmonious measures of a dance; and let us select one stanza, of the tides:

For lo, the sea that fleets about the land, And like a girdle clips her solid waist, Music and Measure both doth understand; For his great Crystal Eye is always cast Up to the Moon, and on her fixèd fast; And as she daunceth in her pallid sphere, So daunceth he about the centre here.

This may be fantastic. As the late Professor Skeat informed the world solemnly in a footnote, "Modern astronomy has exploded the singular notion of revolving hollow concentric spheres...." (The Professor wrote "singular" when he meant "curious."—The notion was never "singular.") "These 'spheres,' " he adds, "have disappeared, and their music with them, except in poetry." Nevertheless the fable presents a truth, and one of the two most important truths in the world. This Universe is not a Chaos. (If it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about it at all.) It stands and is continually renewed upon an ascertained harmony: and what Plato called "Necessity" is the duty in all things of obedience to that harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth sings in his noble Ode,

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And his most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.

Now the other and only equally important truth in the world is that this macrocosm of the Universe, with its harmony, cannot be apprehended at all except as it is focussed upon the eye and intellect of Man, the microcosm. All "transcendental" philosophy,—all discussions of the "Absolute," of mind and matter, of "subjective" and "objective" knowledge, of "ideas" and "phenomena," "flux" and "permanence"—all "systems" and "schools," down from the earliest to be found in "Ritter and Preller," through Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, on to Aquinas, to Abelard, to the great scholastic disputants between Realism and Nominalism; again on to Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Comte, Hegel, and yet again on to James and Bergson—all inevitably work out to this, that the Universal Harmony is meaningless and nothing to Man save in so far as he apprehends it, and that he can only apprehend it by reference to some corresponding harmony within himself. Lacking him, the harmony (so far as he knows) would utterly lack the compliment of an audience: by his

own faulty instrument he must seek to interpret it, if it is to be interpreted at all: and so, like the man at the piano, he goes on "doing his best."

"God created Man in His image," says the Scripture: "and," adds Heine, "Man made haste to return the compliment." It sounds wicked, but is one of the truest things ever said. After all, and without vanity, it is the best compliment Man can pay, poor fellow!—and he goes on striving to pay it, though often enough rebuked for his zeal. "Canst thou," demands the divine Interlocutor in the Book of Job—

"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?"

To this, fallen and arraigned man, using his best jargon, responds that "the answer is in the negative. I never pretended to do these things, only to guess, in my small way, how they are done."

Nor is there any real irreverence in answering thus: for of course it is not the Almighty who puts the questions, but someone audaciously personating Him. And some of us find this pretension irritating; as Douglas Jerrold meeting a pompous stranger on the pavement was moved to accost him with, "I beg your pardon, Sir, but would you mind informing me—Are you anybody in particular?"

Again, in the sixth chapter of the Second Book of Esdras, someone usurping the voice of the Almighty and using (be it said to his credit) excellent prose, declares:

"In the beginning, when the earth was made, before the waters of the world stood, or ever the wind blew, Before it thundered or lightened, or ever the foundations of paradise were laid, Before the fair flowers were seen, or ever the moveable powers were established; before the innumerable multitude of angels were gathered together, Or ever the heights of the air were lifted up, before the measures of the firmament were named, or ever the chimneys of Zion were hot. Then did I consider these things, and they all were made through Me alone, and through none other: by Me also they shall be ended, and by none other."

It is all very beautiful: but (for aught that appears) no one was denying it. It has been shrewdly objected against the arguments of the "affable Archangel" in the later books of Paradise Lost that argument by its nature admits of being answered: and the fatal fallacy of putting human speech into a divine mouth, as in the above passage, is that it invites retort.

A sensible man does not aspire to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades: but he may, and does, aspire to understand something of the universal harmony in which he and they bear a part, if only that he may render it a more perfect obedience. "Let me know," he craves, "that I may accept my fate intelligently, even though it prove that under the iron rule of Necessity I have no more freedom of will than the dead,

Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees."

The claim (as Man must think) is a just one—for why was he given intelligence if not to use it? And even though disallowed as presumptuous, it is an instinctive one. Man is, after all, a part of the Universe, and just as surely as the Pleiades or Arcturus: and moreover he feels in himself a harmony correspondent with the greater harmony of his quest. His heart beats to a rhythm: his blood pulses through steady circuits; like the plants by which he is fed, he comes to birth, grows, begets his kind, dies, and returns to earth; like the tides, his days of gestation obey the moon and can be reckoned by her; in the sweat of his body he tills the ground, and by the seasons, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, his life while it lasts is regulated. But above all he is the microcosm, the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense cosmic circle focusses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass—and he is not shrivelled up by the miracle! Other creatures (he notes) share his sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not his intelligence—or, if at all, in no degree worth

measuring. So far as he can detect, he is not only an actor in the grand cosmic pageant, but the sole intelligent spectator. As a poor Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, wrote of the small town of his childhood:—

The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, their skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars; and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it....

But little did the infant dream That all the treasures of the world were by; And that himself was so the cream And crown of all which round about did lie. Yet thus it was: the Gem, The Diadem, The ring enclosing all That stood upon this earthly ball, The heavenly Eye, Much wider than the sky Wherein they all included were, The glorious soul that was the King, Made to possess them, did appear A small and little thing!

We may safely go some way even beyond this, and lay it down for unchallengeable truth that over and above Man's consciousness of being the eye of the Universe and receptacle, however imperfect, of its great harmony, he has a native impulse to merge himself in that harmony and be one with it: a spirit in his heart (as the Scripture puts it) "of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father"—And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. In his daily life he is for ever seeking after harmony in avoidance of chaos, cultivating personal habits after the clock; in his civic life forming governments, attempting hierarchies, laws, constitutions, by which (as he hopes) a system of society will work in tune, almost automatically. When he fights he has learnt that his fighting men shall march in rhythm and deploy rhythmically, and they do so to regimental music. If he haul rope or weigh anchor, setting out to sea, or haul up his ship on a beach, he has proved by experiment that

these operations are performed more than twice as easily when done to a tune. But these are dull, less than half-conscious, imitations of the great harmony for which, when he starts out to understand and interpret it consciously, he must use the most godlike of all his gifts. Now the most godlike of all human gifts—the singular gift separating Man from the brutes—is speech. If he can harmonise speech he has taught his first and peculiar faculty to obey the great rhythm: "I will sing and give praise," says the Psalmist, "with the best member that I have." Thus by harmonising speech (in a fashion we will discuss by and by), he arrives at Poetry.

But an objection may be raised. "Is the tongue, rather than the brain, the best member that I have?" or (to put it in another way), "Surely a man's thoughts about the Universe have more value than his words about it?"

The answer is, that we cannot separate them: and Newman has put this so cogently that I must quote him, making no attempt to water down his argument with words of my own. "Thought and speech are inseparable from one another. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinking out into language. This is literature; not things, but the verbal symbols of things; not on the other hand mere words, but thoughts expressed in language. Call to mind the meaning of the Greek word which expresses this special prerogative of Man over the feeble intelligence of the lower animals. It is called Logos. What does Logos mean? It stands both for reason and for speech, and it is difficult to say which means more properly. It means both at once: why? Because really they cannot be divided.... When we can separate light and illumination, life and motion, the convex and the concave of a curve, then will it be possible for thought to tread speech under foot and to hope to do without it—then will it be conceivable that the vigorous and fertile

intellect should renounce its own double, its instrument of expression and the channel of its speculations and emotions." Words, in short, are the outward and visible signs of thought: that, and something more—since you may prove by experiment that the shortest and simplest train of thought cannot be followed unless at every step the mind silently casts it into the mould of words.

As an instrument for reconciling Man's inward harmony with the great outer harmony of the Universe, Poetry is notoriously imperfect. Men have tried others therefore—others that appeared at first sight more promising, such as Music and Mathematics—yet on the whole to their disappointment.

Take Mathematics. Numbers inhere in all harmony. By numbers harmony can be expressed far more severely than by Poetry, and so successfully up to a point, that poets have borrowed the very word to dignify their poor efforts. They "lisp in numbers"—or so they say: and the curious may turn to the Parmenides, to Book vii. of The Republic and others of the Dialogues and note how Plato, hunting on the trail of many distinguished predecessors, pursues Mathematics up to the point where, as a means of interpreting to Man the Universal harmony, Mathematics, like Philosophy, inevitably breaks down. Mathematics, an abstract science, breaks down just because it is abstract and in no way personal: because though it may calculate and time and even weigh parts of the greater Universe, it cannot, by defect of its nature, bring its discoveries back to bear on the other harmony of Man. It is impersonal and therefore nescient of his need. Though by such a science he gain the whole world, it shall not profit a man who misses from it his own soul.

Philosophy, too, fails us over this same crux of "personality"; not by ignoring it, but by clinging with obstinacy to the wrong end of the stick. The quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry is notorious and inveterate: and at ninety-nine points in the hundred Philosophy has the better of the dispute; as the Fox in the fable had ninety-nine ways of evading the hounds, against the Cat's solitary one. But the Cat could climb a tree.

So Philosophy has almost all the say in this matter, until Poetry interjects the fatal question, "I beg your pardon, Madam, but do you happen to be the Almighty, or are you playing Egeria to his Numa? You are constructing admirably comprehensive schemes and systems for His guidance, if your hints will but be taken. But if you address yourself to Man, you will find that his business is not at all to comprehend the Universe; for this, if he could achieve it, would make him equal with God. What he more humbly aspires to, is to apprehend; to pierce by flashes of insight to some inch or so of the secret, to some star to which he can hitch his waggon. Now there are," Poetry goes on, "certain men, granted to dwell among us, of more delicate mental fibre than their fellows; men whose minds have as it were exquisite filaments which they throw out to intercept, apprehend and conduct home to Man stray messages between the outer mystery of the Universe and the inner mystery of his soul; even as modern telegraphy has learnt to search out, snatch

and gather home messages wandering astray over waste waters of Ocean. Such men are the poets, my servants."

"Moreover," Poetry will continue, "these men do not collect their messages as your philosophers do, by vigorous striving and learning; nor, as the priests of Baal did, by cutting themselves and crying; but by schooling their souls to harmony and awaiting the moment of apprehension with what one of them has called 'a wise passiveness.' For it is not their method to wrestle with God, like Jacob, or to hold Him up with a 'Stand and deliver.' It is enough for them to be receptacles of His passing breath, as the harps abandoned and hung on willow-trees by the waters of Babylon may have caught, at evening, and hummed the wind whispering from Israel. And for this, while they hang and wait, they will be despised by the commonalty for indolent fellows, as indeed they are; as when the wind inspires and sets them hymning, they will be accused of insobriety. Yet always they excel your philosophers, insomuch as they accept the transcendental as really transcendental and do not profess to instruct the Almighty in it; and chiefly, perhaps, they excel

your philosophers by opposing a creativeness, potential at any rate, against a certain and foredoomed barrenness. For the philosophers would get at the secret by reason, contemning emotion; whereas the poet knows that creation implies fatherhood, and fatherhood implies emotion, even passionate emotion. It is (take it as a cold fact) only on the impulse of yearning, on the cry of Abba, that the creature can leap to any real understanding of the Creator."

Yet the philosopher will go on to the end of time despising the poet, who grasps at mysteries per saltum, neglecting the military road of logic.

Shall we then, by a violent recoil, abandon Mathematics and Philosophy and commit our faith to Music? Music is, above all things, harmonious: Music has the emotion in which Mathematics and Philosophy have been found wanting. Music can be "personal"; Music, since the invention of counterpoint, is capable of harmonies deeper and more intricate than any within the range of human speech. In short, against Poetry, Music can set up a very strong claim.