TWO LECTURES INTRODUCTORY TO THE STUDY OF POETRY

BY THE Rev. H. C. BEECHING M.A.

LATE CLARK LECTURER AT TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, PROFESSOR OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY AT KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON, CHAPLAIN TO THE HON. SOC. OF LINCOLN’S INN.

CAMBRIDGE: AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1901

[All Rights reserved.]

Cambridge: PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

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PASSION AND IMAGINATION IN POETRY.

The unsatisfactoriness of definitions of poetry arises usually from one or other of two causes. If the definition is that of a critic, it is the resultant of a long analytical process, and therefore not very intelligible apart from the process by which it has been arrived at; if it is the definition of a poet, it is certain to contain that element of poetry which it professes to explain. Nevertheless, the most helpful aperçus into poetry are those which the poets themselves have given us, and of them all none is more helpful than that inspired parenthesis in which Milton one day summed up its characteristics as “simple, sensuous, and passionate.”

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We may presume that by his first epithet Milton intended that simplicity which is another name for sincerity. He meant that a poet must look at the world frankly and with open eyes; with the spirit, though with more than the wisdom, of a child. We sometimes express another side of the same truth by saying that poetry is “universal,” meaning that it cares nothing for superficial and transient fashions, but is interested only “in man, in nature, and in human life,” in their permanent elements. This first epithet seems to fix beyond dispute an indispensable quality of all poetry. If a writer is insincere, or if he is conventional and fashionable, we are sure, whatever his airs and graces, that he is no poet. By “sensuous” it is probable that Milton meant what, in more technical language, we should describe as “concrete.” Poetry deals with things, and it deals with people; it sings of birds and flowers and stars; it sings of the wrath of Achilles, the wanderings of Ulysses and Æneas, the woes of [Pg 3]King Œdipus, the problems of Brutus and

Hamlet; whatever be the thought or the emotion it is concerned with, it is concerned with them as operating on a particular occasion; it has no concern with the intellect or the emotions or the will in abstraction from this or that wise or passionate or wilful person⁠[1]⁠. By his third epithet Milton, as most will agree, touched, or almost touched, the heart of the matter. We all conceive prose to be an adequate vehicle for our level feelings, but as soon as we are deeply moved and wish to express our emotion we instinctively turn to the poets. Wordsworth is at one with Milton in fixing upon passion as [Pg 4]of the essence of poetry, which he in one place defines as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” It does not matter for poetry what the emotion is that overflows; it may be love or hate, pity or fear, awe or indignation, joy or sorrow; what matters for poetry is that some passion there should be, for some particular object, and that it should be sincerely and deeply felt.

Essential, however, as passion is, so that where there is no passion there can be no poetry, in saying passion we have not said the last word. Anyone may prove this to himself by a simple reminiscence. He may at some time have been in love, for, according to Patmore, “Love wakes men once a lifetime each”; and, perhaps, in a mood of exaltation he may have taken pen and paper for a sonnet to his mistress’ eyebrow; but the poetry did not come; or, if something came, in a calmer mood he recognized that it was not poetry. Or we may illustrate from other passions. At the Queen’s [Pg 5]Jubilee a few years since we were all passionately loyal, and the morning newspapers vied with each other in producing odes; but no one could mistake any one of them for poetry. Or, the other day, again, when the Rennes verdict was announced, the intelligence of England was roused to a passion of indignation. I took up my weekly gazette the next Saturday morning and found that indignation had made a good many verses, in none of which was there a tincture of poetry. There was much cursing and

swearing, and appealing to Heaven for vengeance; but the point of view was merely that of “the man in the street.”

These simple examples will suffice to show that poetry requires a manner of viewing things which is not that of the average man, but is individual to the poet; it requires, in a word, genius. One could hardly expect Milton to point this out; having genius himself he would assume that everyone else had genius; he would assume that we all had the power of looking at [Pg 6]the world not only frankly but freshly, because he would not understand any other way of looking at it. Now, it is this fresh outlook and insight, this power of viewing things and people out of the associations in which the rest of mankind habitually view them, that is the root of the whole matter. In the world of nature we find the poets moved even to passion by objects that we hardly notice, or from long familiarity have come to ignore. Their strong emotion arises from their fresh vision. By means of that fresh vision the world never ceases to be an interesting place to them.

So sang Wither of the Poetic Muse; and Blake expresses the same truth in his inspired doggrel:

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The converse of the proposition also holds true: what to others may appear facts of the highest importance, may to the poet appear trifles. Similarly in the world of men we find the poets as much interested in the least as in the greatest, and we find them unconcerned by many of the distinctions which to mankind in general appear vital. We find, for example, Andrew Marvell introducing into his panegyric of Oliver Protector a picture of King Charles at his execution, which embalms the secret of all the cavalier loyalty, and is to-day the oftenest quoted passage of his poem.

The poet’s subjects, then, are borrowed from any quarter in the whole range of nature and human experience; “the world is all before him where to choose”; anything that excites any deep emotion in him is a fit topic for his verse, and it is our privilege for the moment, so far as that one experience is concerned, to look [Pg 8]through his eyes. In this way the poets interpret the world to us. They also interpret us to ourselves. They make adventurous voyages into hitherto unsounded seas of the human spirit, and bring us word of their discoveries. And what they thus win becomes an inalienable possession to the race; the boundaries of humanity are pushed back. This power of interpreting the world and human life is sometimes spoken of as an idealizing faculty, and no exception can be taken to the term so long as it is not explained to mean that the poet tricks up what he sees in false lights in order to please us. For anyone who considers the best poetry, whether about the universe or man’s heart,—and it is only the best that must determine

the genus—will admit that, so far as he has trusted himself to it, it has convinced him of its entire veracity. It is idealized only in the sense that a landscape is idealized by the removal of the accidental and commonplace details, which sufficed to blind others to the beauty that [Pg 9]the painter distinguished. The artist, poet or painter, sees the light that never was on sea or land until he saw it; but when he has once seen it and shown it us, we can all see that it is there, and is not merely a figment of his fancy. This mode of viewing things, which by its freshness reveals, or interprets, or idealizes, is what is meant by Poetical Imagination.

But now that that most terrifying of technical terms has been mentioned, it may be well to make a short summary of the various senses in which the word is habitually employed, in order to observe what all, or any, of them have in common, and how they connect one with another.

(a) When a psychologist speaks of imagination he is not thinking of poetry; he means by the word the power of summoning again before the mind’s eye vivid images of what has been once seen. He bids us look carefully at our breakfast-table, and then, closing our eyes, notice how much of it we can recall, how clear [Pg 10]or dim an image. Whether skill in this memory-picturing has any link with poetical imagination it would be hard to say; certainly to no one would a power of vividly recalling images be of greater service. The faculty seems to be entirely distinct from the power of attention and close observation.

(b) A more familiar usage of the word is that which makes it almost a synonym for sympathy—the power of projecting self into the circumstances of others. We know to our cost that many men and women are sadly to seek in this faculty, and it seems to be no especial prerogative of poets, though Shelley thought so. He speaks of the poet as—

And in his prose essay he says: “A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become [Pg 11]his own”; and he continues, “The great instrument of moral good is imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause” (Essays, I. 16). Shelley in this passage is theorizing too much from his own personal feelings; for it has often been remarked that poets have been singularly lacking in imagination of this moral sort, and some have been conspicuous for an intense selfishness in their domestic relations.

(c) But the word is also used not of moral, but of intellectual, sympathy; a power of appreciating, by an act of intuition, the characteristic qualities of things and people so as to be able to set out a train of consequences. A celebrated novelist was once congratulated upon the admirable drawing in one of her books of a particular school of Dissenters, and she was asked what opportunities she had enjoyed of studying them. Her reply was that she had once caught sight of a group of them through a half-opened door as she mounted a staircase. [Pg 12]That is no doubt an extreme case, but it is all the more useful as an illustration. It helps us to realize how potent a faculty is the endowment of the dramatist, which can pierce through human appearance to its essential qualities, can conceive by a sure instinct how, in given circumstances, the given character must act, and can represent it to us, because it is vivid to him, in all the verisimilitude of essential detail. Such imagination is plainly one large and special side of the faculty of seeing things out of their

commonplace associations. As a branch of the same head would rank the still rarer power of conceiving types of character, that for certain reasons have no actual existence in the world we know, such types as Shakespeare’s Ariel and Caliban and Puck.

(d) The word imagination is also used of a faculty which may at first sight seem the opposite of this—a faculty of seeing people and objects not as they are in themselves, but coloured by the atmosphere of joy or gloom [Pg 13]through which they are seen. The truth, however, probably is that nothing at all is, or ever can be, seen out of some atmosphere, a thing in itself being merely an abstraction; but the greater a poet is, the more various are his moods, while with lesser men a particular mood may cover all the objects in their poetical world.

(e) Again, the word has a narrower and more technical sense; namely, the power of detecting resemblances in nature for the purpose of poetical illustration. This use of the term is not merely freakish, but connects with that broader and more fundamental sense to which I have so many times referred, the power and habit of seeing the “common things that round us lie” out of their commonplace associations, of seeing them in more subtle and original associations. For it is the power of bringing together two objects or events that the ordinary person would never dream of connecting, but in which the poet’s eye has detected similarity, and which he therefore places side by side so that [Pg 14]one may throw light upon the other. Our thinking, it will be admitted, is largely associational; one thing recalls another; but it is the prerogative of poets that the tracks between idea and idea in their minds are not those of common trade. Recur for a moment to Wither’s reference to a daisy. We know beforehand what a daisy will suggest to a child, what to

a gardener, what to a botanist; we do not know beforehand what it will suggest to a poet. It may suggest, as it did to Chaucer, a crowned queen:—

How utterly different from this is the vision of Burns! To him the daisy is the type of humble cheerfulness, sweet neighbour and meet companion of the humble and cheerful lark. How different, again, was the feeling it inspired [Pg 15]in Wordsworth! The point to strike home to him was the touch of kinship between the simplest flower and man in the fact that both are alive:

Imagination, used in this restricted sense of the interpretation of phenomena by comparison, is often contrasted with a weaker form of itself to which the name of Fancy is given. The distinction was introduced into these islands by Coleridge, from whom it was borrowed by Wordsworth; it was then popularized by Leigh Hunt and afterwards by Ruskin. It has played in the last half century so prominent a part in the criticism of poetry, that it is perhaps worth while to look it for once fairly in the face. Coleridge was always promising to give a disquisition upon Poetical Imagination, but he never kept his word; he did, however, what was almost better; in the Biographia Literaria he illustrated his meaning from some passages [Pg 16]in his friend’s poems; and we gather from his comments that he did not at all mean Imagination to be distinguished from Fancy as the perception of deeper from that of more superficial resemblances; he wished the term Fancy to be kept for the use of poetical imagery of all kinds, and the term Imagination to be used of

the poet’s faculty as a creative artist. He speaks of it as a unifying power, bringing together whatever will help his purpose, and rejecting all that is impertinent and unessential. He speaks of it also as a vivifying power, turning “bodies to spirits by sublimation strange.” That is to say he uses Imagination not so much of a quality of the poet’s mind as of an artistic power which he exercises, the power of imposing living form upon dead matter,—he calls it in the Ode to Dejection “my shaping spirit of imagination”;—but it is not hard to see that this unifying and vitalizing power depends upon what is the characteristic essence of imagination, the unanalyzable power of seeing things [Pg 17]freshly and in new and harmonious associations. The idea must precede the execution, and it is a small matter whether the term Imagination be employed of the idea or the embodiment. Between Imagination and Fancy, therefore, as Coleridge conceived them, there could be no confusion.

The trouble began with Wordsworth. By Imagination, as by Fancy, Wordsworth practically means the use of poetical imagery; but he ascribes to the higher faculty the images which occur to the poet not in his superficial moods, but under the influence of deeper emotion⁠[2]⁠. Leigh Hunt preserved and illustrated this distinction from a wide range of poets. [Pg 18]Mr Ruskin, in the second volume of Modern Painters (p. 163), turned aside from an elaborate disquisition upon Imagination in painting to speak of poetry. “The Fancy,” he says, “sees the outside, and so is able to give a portrait of the outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail; the Imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted in its giving of outer detail.” And then follows a remarkable parallel between the flower passage in Lycidas and that in the Winter’s Tale, greatly to the disadvantage of the former.

It will be remembered that the passage from Lycidas is printed with marginal notes, as follows:—

Then follows the passage from the Winter’s Tale:—

And then comes this criticism:

“Observe how the imagination in these last lines goes into the very inmost soul of every flower, after having touched them all at first with that heavenly timidness, the shadow of Proserpine’s, and gilded them with celestial gathering, and never stops on their spots or their bodily shape; while Milton sticks in the stains upon them and puts us off with that unhappy freak of jet in the very flower that, without this bit of paper-staining, would have been the most precious to us of all. ‘There is pansies, that’s for thoughts.’”

I do not know whether this comparison has ever been the subject of adverse comment: I have often heard it praised. To me, I confess, [Pg 20]it seems a compendium of all the faults that a critic of poetry should avoid: waywardness, preciosity, inattention, and the uncritical use of critical labels. In the first place the critic has ignored what is of the first consequence, the motive of the two pieces, and has treated them as parallel flower-passages from a volume of elegant extracts; whereas no criticism can be to the point that does not recognize that Milton’s flowers are being gathered for a funeral, and Shakespeare’s are not to be gathered at all; they are visionary spring flowers, seen in glory through the autumn haze. Without going at length through each passage it is worth noticing that Shakespeare’s lines about the primrose are open to precisely the same censure, no more and no less, as Mr Ruskin accords to Milton’s pansy. The epithet “pale” is very far from “going into the very inmost soul” of the primrose, which is a hardy flower, and not in the

least anæmic; it “sticks in the stains” upon the surface as much as the “freaked with jet”; [Pg 21]and this, again, so far from being “unhappy,” gives the reason why the pansy was chosen for the hearse among the flowers that “sad embroidery wear.” A second point to notice concerns the lines that are marked “nugatory.” Both Shakespeare and Milton had the instinct to see that just as, on the one hand, a flower-passage must not be a mere catalogue, so, on the other, each item must not be unduly emphasized. And so we find that, while Milton has his “tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine,” and his “well-attir’d woodbine” to make up the bunch, Shakespeare also has his

a “nugatory” passage which Mr Ruskin omits from his quotation. So much, then, for the contrast of Imagination and Fancy, which critics might now be content to let die.

In resuming what has been said about the two great characteristics of the poetical mind, [Pg 22]its passion and its imagination, it may be useful to illustrate from the picture that our great dramatist has drawn of the poetical character in the person of Macbeth. Macbeth, indeed, was a poet without a conscience; but that circumstance is to the advantage of our illustration, since we shall not be able to confuse his morality with his poetry. There are several points that may be noticed.

1. First, though on this much stress must not be laid, we observe Macbeth’s power of summoning up, and vividly objectifying impressions of sense. He sees an air-drawn dagger. He hears a voice say, “Sleep no more.”

2. Secondly, and this is fundamental, we remark the passionate intensity with which he realizes whatever comes before him, his own states of mind, or events that happen, and sees them in all their attendant circumstances and consequences. No fact that at all interests him remains a barren fact to him, and most facts [Pg 23]do interest him. When he is contemplating the death of Duncan he appreciates thoroughly and entirely all that is involved in that death:—