Joyous Gard

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> Joyous Gard

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But the end and aim of all these various influences is the same; their
power lies in the fact that they quicken in the spirit the sense of
the energy, the delight, the greatness of life, the share that we can
claim in them, the largeness of our own individual hope and destiny;
and that is the real work of all the thoughts that may be roughly
called poetical; that they reveal to us something permanent and strong
and beautiful, something which has an irrepressible energy, and which
outlines itself clearly upon the dark background of days, a spirit
with which we can join hands and hold deep communication, which we
instinctively feel is the greatest reality of the world. In such
moments we perceive that the times when we descend into the meaner
and duller and drearier businesses of life are interludes in our real
being, into which we have to descend, not because of the actual worth
of the baser tasks, but that we may practise the courage and the hope
we ought to bring away from the heavenly vision. The more that men
have this thirst for beauty, for serene energy, for fulness of life,
the higher they are in the scale, and the less will they quarrel with
the obscurity and humility of their lives, because they are
confidently waiting for a purer, higher, more untroubled life, to
which we are all on our way, whether we realise it or no!

V

ART

It is not uncommon for me to receive letters from young aspirants,
containing poems, and asking me for an opinion on their merits. Such a
letter generally says that the writer feels it hardly worth while to
go on writing poetry unless he or she is assured that the poems are
worth something. In such cases I reply that the answer lies there!
Unless it seems worth while, unless indeed poetry is the outcome of an
irrepressible desire to express something, it is certainly not worth
while writing. On the other hand, if the desire is there, it is just
as well worth practising as any other form of artistic expression. A
man who liked sketching in water-colours would not be restrained from
doing so by the fear that he might not become an Academician, a person
who liked picking out tunes on a piano need not desist because there
is no prospect of his earning money by playing in public!

Poetry is of all forms of literary expression the least likely to
bring a man credit or cash. Most intelligent people with a little gift
of writing have a fair prospect of getting prose articles published.
But no one wants third-rate poetry; editors fight shy of it, and
volumes of it are unsaleable.

I have myself written so much poetry, have published so many volumes
of verse, that I can speak sympathetically on the subject. I worked
very hard indeed at poetry for seven or eight years, wrote little
else, and the published volumes form only a small part of my output,
which exists in many manuscript volumes. I achieved no particular
success. My little books were fairly well received, and I sold a few
hundred copies; I have even had a few pieces inserted in anthologies.
But though I have wholly deserted the practice of poetry, and though I
can by no means claim to be reckoned a poet, I do not in the least
regret the years I gave to it. In the first place it was an intense
pleasure to write. The cadences, the metres, the language, the
rhymes, all gave me a rapturous delight. It trained minute
observation--my poems were mostly nature-poems--and helped me to
disentangle the salient points and beauties of landscapes, hills,
trees, flowers, and even insects. Then too it is a very real training
in the use of words; it teaches one what words are musical, sonorous,
effective; while the necessity of having to fit words to metre
increases one's stock of words and one's power of applying them. When
I came back to writing prose, I found that I had a far larger and more
flexible vocabulary than I had previously possessed; and though the
language of poetry is by no means the same as that of prose--it is a
pity that the two kinds of diction are so different in English,
because it is not always so in other languages--yet it made the
writing of ornamental and elaborate prose an easier matter; it gave
one too a sense of form; a poem must have a certain balance and
proportion; so that when one who has written verse comes to write
prose, a subject falls easily into divisions, and takes upon itself a
certain order of course and climax.

But these are only consequences and resulting advantages. The main
reason for writing poetry is and must be the delight of doing it, the
rapture of perceiving a beautiful subject, and the pleasure of
expressing it as finely and delicately as one can. I have given it up
because, as William Morris once said of himself, "to make poetry just
for the sake of making it is a crime for a man of my age and
experience!"

One's feelings lose poetic flow
Soon after twenty-seven or so!

One begins to think of experience in a different sort of way, not as a
series of glowing points and pictures, which outline themselves
radiantly upon a duller background, but as a rich full thing, like a
great tapestry, all of which is important, if it is not all beautiful.
It is not that the marvel and wonder of life is less; but it is more
equable, more intricate, more mysterious. It does not rise at times,
like a sea, into great crested breakers, but it comes marching in
evenly, roller after roller, as far as the eye can reach.

And then too poetry becomes cramped and confined for all that one
desires to say. One lived life, as a young man, rather for the sake
of the emotions which occasionally transfigured it, with a priestly
sense of its occasional splendour; there was not time to be leisurely,
humorous, gently interested. But as we grow older, we perceive that
poetical emotion is but one of many forces, and our sympathy grows and
extends itself in more directions. One had but little patience in the
old days for quiet, prosaic, unemotional people; but now it becomes
clear that a great many persons live life on very simple and direct
lines; one wants to understand their point of view better, one is
conscious of the merits of plainer stuff; and so the taste broadens
and deepens, and becomes like a brimming river rather than a leaping
crystal fount. Life receives a hundred affluents, and is tinged with
many new substances; and one begins to see that if poetry is the
finest and sweetest interpretation of life, it is not always the
completest or even the largest.

If we examine the lives of poets, we too often see how their
inspiration flagged and failed. Milton indeed wrote his noblest verse
in middle-age, after a life immersed in affairs. Wordsworth went on
writing to the end, but all his best poetry was written in about five
early years. Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is
little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote
before he was forty. Browning produced volume after volume, but, with
the exception of an occasional fine lyric, his later work is hardly
more than an illustration of his faults of writing. Coleridge deserted
poetry very early; Byron, Shelley, Keats, all died comparatively
young.

The Letters of Keats give perhaps a more vivid and actual view of the
mind and soul of a poet than any other existing document. One sees
there, naively and nobly expressed, the very essence of the poetical
nature, the very soil out of which poetry flowers. It is wonderful,
because it is so wholly sane, simple, and unaffected. It is usual to
say that the Letters give one a picture of rather a second-rate and
suburban young man, with vulgar friends and _banal_ associations, with
one prodigious and matchless faculty. But it is that very background
that constitutes the supreme force of the appeal. Keats accepted his
circumstances, his friends, his duties with a singular modesty. He was
not for ever complaining that he was unappreciated and underestimated.
His commonplaceness, when it appears, is not a defect of quality, but
an eager human interest in the personalities among whom his lot was
cast. But every now and then there swells up a poignant sense of
passion and beauty, a sacred, haunting, devouring fire of inspiration,
which leaps high and clear upon the homely altar.

Thus he writes: "This morning poetry has conquered--I have relapsed
into those abstractions which are my only life--I feel escaped from a
new, strange, and threatening sorrow.... There is an awful warmth
about my heart, like a load of immortality." Or again: "I feel more
and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live
in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds." And again: "I have
loved the principle of beauty in all things."

One sees in these passages that there not only is a difference of
force and passion, but an added quality of some kind in the mind of a
poet, a combination of fine perception and emotion, which
instantaneously and instinctively translates itself into words.

For it must never be forgotten how essential a part of the poet is the
knack of words. I do not doubt that there are hundreds of people who
are haunted and penetrated by a lively sense of beauty, whose emotions
are fiery and sweet, but who have not just the intellectual store of
words, which must drip like honey from an overflowing jar. It is a
gift as definite as that of the sculptor or the musician, an exuberant
fertility and swiftness of brain, that does not slowly and painfully
fit a word into its place, but which breathes thought direct into
music.

The most subtle account of this that I know is given in a passage in
Shelley's _Defence of Poetry_. He says: "A man cannot say 'I will
compose poetry'--the greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in
creation is like a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like
an inconstant wind, awakes to transitory brightness. The power arises
from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it
is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic
either of its approach or its departure. When composition begins,
inspiration is already on the decline."

That I believe is as true as it is beautiful. The best poetry is
written in a sudden rapture, and probably needs but little
reconsideration or retouching. One knows for instance how the _Ode to
the Nightingale_ was scribbled by Keats on a spring morning, in an
orchard at Hampstead, and so little regarded that it was rescued by a
friend from the volume into which he had crammed the slips of
manuscript. Of course poets vary greatly in their method; but one may
be sure of this, that no poem which was not a great poem in its first
transcript, ever becomes a great poem by subsequent handling. There
are poets indeed like Rossetti and FitzGerald who made a worse poem
out of a better by scrupulous correction; and the first drafts of
great poems are generally the finest poems of all. A poem has
sometimes been improved by excision, notably in the case of Tennyson,
whose abandoned stanzas, printed in his Life, show how strong his
instinct was for what was best and purest. A great poet, for instance,
never, like a lesser poet, keeps an unsatisfactory stanza for the sake
of a good line. Tennyson, in a fine homely image, said that a poem
must have a certain curve of its own, like the curve of the rind of a
pared apple thrown on the floor. It must have a perfect evolution and
progress, and this can sometimes be best arrived at by the omission
of stanzas in which the inconstant or flagging mind turned aside from
its design.

But it is certain that if the poet gets so much into the habit of
writing poetry, that even when he has no sense of inspiration he must
still write to satisfy a craving, the result will be worthless, as it
too often was in the case of Wordsworth. Because such poems become
literary instead of poetical; and literary poetry has no
justification.

If we take a book like Rossetti's _House of Life_, we shall find that
certain sonnets stand out with a peculiar freshness and brightness, as
in the golden sunlight of an autumn morning; while many of the sonnets
give us the sense of slow and gorgeous evolution, as if contrived by
some poetical machine. I was interested to find, in studying the
_House of Life_ carefully, that all the finest poems are early work;
and when I came to look at the manuscripts, I was rather horrified to
see what an immense amount of alternatives had been produced. There
would be, for instance, no less than eight or nine of those great
slowly moving words, like 'incommunicable' or 'importunate' written
down, not so much to express an inevitable idea as to fill an
inevitable space; and thus the poems seem to lose their pungency by
the slow absorption of painfully sought agglutinations of syllables,
with a stately music of their own, of course, but garnered rather than
engendered. Rossetti's great dictum about the prime necessity for
poetry being 'fundamental brainwork' led him here into error. The
brainwork must be fundamental and instinctive; it must all have been
done before the poem is conceived; and very often a poet acquires his
power through sacrificing elaborate compositions which have taught him
certainty of touch, but are not in themselves great poetry. Subsequent
brainwork often merely clouds the effect, and it was that on which
Rossetti spent himself in vain.

The view which Keats took of his own _Endymion_ is a far larger and
bolder one. "I will write independently," he said. "I have written
independently _without judgment_. I may write independently and _with
judgment_ hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own
salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by
sensation and watchfulness in itself."

Of course, fine craftsmanship is an absolute necessity; but it is
craftsmanship which is not only acquired by practice, but which is
actually there from the first, just as Mozart, as a child of eight,
could play passages which would tax the skill of the most accomplished
virtuoso. It was not learnt by practice, that swift correspondence of
eye and hand, any more than the little swallow learns to fly; it knows
it all already, and is merely finding out what it knows.

And therefore there is no doubt that a man cannot become a poet by
taking thought. He can perhaps compose impressive verse, but that is
all. Poetry is, as Plato says, a divine sort of experience, some
strange blending of inherited characteristics, perhaps the fierce
emotion of some dumb ancestress combining with the verbal skill of
some unpoetical forefather. The receipt is unknown, not necessarily
unknowable.

Of course if one has poetry in one's soul, it is a tremendous
temptation to desire its expression, because the human race, with its
poignant desire for transfiguring visions, strews the path of the
great poet with bays, and remembers him as it remembers no other human
beings. What would one not give to interpret life thus, to flash the
loveliness of perception into desirous minds, to set love and hope
and yearning to music, to inspire anxious hearts with the sense that
there is something immensely large, tender, and significant behind it
all! That is what we need to be assured of--our own significance, our
own share in the inheritance of joy; and a poet can teach us to wait,
to expect, to arise, to adore, when the circumstances of our lives are
wrapped in mist and soaked with dripping rain. Perhaps that is the
greatest thing which poetry does for us, to reassure us, to enlighten
us, to send us singing on our way, to bid us trust in God even though
He is concealed behind calamity and disaster, behind grief and
heaviness, misinterpreted to us by philosophers and priests, and
horribly belied by the wrongful dealings of men.

VI

ART AND MORALITY

There is a perpetual debate going on--one of those moulting
shuttlecocks that serve to make one's battledore give out a merry
sound--about the relation of art to morals, and whether the artist or
the poet ought to attempt to _teach_ anything. It makes a good kind of
debate, because it is conducted in large terms, to which the
disputants attach private meanings. The answer is a very simple one.
It is that art and morality are only beauty realised in different
regions; and as to whether the artist ought to attempt to teach
anything, that may be summarily answered by the simple dictum that no
artist ought ever to attempt to teach anything, with which must be
combined the fact that no one who is serious about anything can
possibly help teaching, whether he wishes or no!

High art and high morality are closely akin, because they are both but
an eager following of the law of beauty; but the artist follows it in
visible and tangible things, and the moralist follows it in the
conduct and relations of life. Artists and moralists must be for ever
condemned to misunderstand each other, because the votary of any art
cannot help feeling that it is the one thing worth doing in the world;
and the artist whose soul is set upon fine hues and forms thinks that
conduct must take care of itself, and that it is a tiresome business
to analyse and formulate it; while the moralist who loves the beauty
of virtue passionately, will think of the artist as a child who plays
with his toys, and lets the real emotions of life go streaming past.

This is a subject upon which it is as well to hear the Greeks, because
the Greeks were of all people who ever lived the most absorbingly
interested in the problems of life, and judged everything by a
standard of beauty. The Jews, of course, at least in their early
history, had the same fiery interest in questions of conduct; but it
would be as absurd to deny to Plato an interest in morals as to
withhold the title of artist from Isaiah and the author of the Book
of Job!

Plato, as is well known, took a somewhat whimsical view of the work of
the poet. He said that he must exclude the poets from his ideal State,
because they were the prophets of unreality. But he was thinking of a
kind of man very different from the men whom we call poets. He thought
of the poet as a man who served a patron, and tried to gloze over his
patron's tyranny and baseness, under false terms of glory and majesty;
or else he thought of dramatists, and considered them to be men who
for the sake of credit and money played skilfully upon the sentimental
emotions of ordinary people; and he fought shy of the writers who used
tragic passions for the amusement of a theatre. Aristotle disagreed
with Plato about this, and held that poetry was not exactly moral
teaching, but that it disposed the mind to consider moral problems as
interesting. He said that in looking on at a play, a spectator
suffered, so to speak, by deputy, but all the same learned directly,
if unconsciously, the beauty of virtue. When we come to our own
Elizabethans, there is no evidence that in their plays and poetry they
thought about morals at all. No one has any idea whether Shakespeare
had any religion, or what it was; and he above all great writers that
ever lived seems to have taken an absolutely impersonal view of the
sins and affections of men and women. No one is scouted or censured or
condemned in Shakespeare; one sees and feels the point of view of his
villains and rogues; one feels with them that they somehow could
hardly have done otherwise than they did; and to effect that is
perhaps the crown of art.

But nowadays the poet, with whom one may include some few novelists,
is really a very independent person. I am not now speaking of those
who write basely and crudely, to please a popular taste. They have
their reward; and after all they are little more than mountebanks, the
end of whose show is to gather up pence in the ring.

But the poet in verse is listened to by few people, unless he is very
great indeed; and even so his reward is apt to be intangible and
scanty; while to be deliberately a lesser poet is perhaps the most
unworldly thing that a man can do, because he thus courts derision;
indeed, if there is a bad sign of the world's temper just now, it is
that men will listen to politicians, scientists, men of commerce, and
journalists, because these can arouse a sensation, or even confer
material benefits; but men will not listen to poets, because they have
so little use for the small and joyful thoughts that make up some of
the best pleasures of life.

It is quite true, as I have said, that no artist ought ever
deliberately to try to teach people, because that is not his business,
and one can only be a good artist by minding one's business, which is
to produce beautiful things; and the moment one begins to try to
produce improving things, one goes off the line. But in England there
has been of late a remarkable fusion of morality and art. Ruskin and
Browning are clear enough proof that it is possible to be passionately
interested in moral problems in an artistic way; while at the same
time it is true, as I have said, that if any man cares eagerly for
beauty, and does his best to present it, he cannot help teaching all
those who are searching for beauty, and only require to be shown the
way.

The work of all real teachers is to make great and arduous things seem
simple and desirable and beautiful. A teacher is not a person who
provides short-cuts to knowledge, or who only drills a character out
of slovenly intellectual faults. The essence of all real teaching is a
sort of inspiration. Take the case of a great teacher, like Arnold or
Jowett; Arnold lit in his pupils' minds a kind of fire, which was
moral rather than intellectual; Jowett had a power of putting a
suggestive brilliancy into dull words and stale phrases, showing that
they were but the crystallised formulas of ideas, which men had found
wonderful or beautiful. The secret of such teaching is quite
incommunicable, but it is a very high sort of art. There are many men
who feel the inspiration of knowledge very deeply, and follow it
passionately, who yet cannot in the least communicate the glow to
others. But just as the great artist can paint a homely scene, such as
we have seen a hundred times, and throw into it something mysterious,
which reaches out hands of desire far beyond the visible horizon, so
can a great teacher show that ideas are living things all bound up
with the high emotions of men.

And thus the true poet, whether he writes verses or novels, is the
greatest of teachers, not because he trains and drills the mind, but
because he makes the thing he speaks of appear so beautiful and
desirable that we are willing to undergo the training and drilling
that are necessary to be made free of the secret. He brings out, as
Plato beautifully said, "the beauty which meets the spirit like a
breeze, and imperceptibly draws the soul, even in childhood, into
harmony with the beauty of reason." The work of the poet then is "to
elicit the simplest principles of life, to clear away complexity, by
giving a glowing and flashing motive to live nobly and generously, to
renew the unspoiled growth of the world, to reveal the secret hope
silently hidden in the heart of man."

_Renovabitur ut aquila juventus tua_--thy youth shall be renewed as an
eagle--that is what we all desire! Indeed it would seem at first sight
that, to gain happiness, the best way would be, if one could, to
prolong the untroubled zest of childhood, when everything was
interesting and exciting, full of novelty and delight. Some few people
by their vitality can retain that freshness of spirit all their life
long. I remember how a friend of R. L. Stevenson told me, that
Stevenson, when alone in London, desperately ill, and on the eve of a
solitary voyage, came to see him; he himself was going to start on a
journey the following day, and had to visit the lumber-room to get out
his trunks; Stevenson begged to be allowed to accompany him, and,
sitting on a broken chair, evolved out of the drifted accumulations of
the place a wonderful romance. But that sort of eager freshness we
most of us find to be impossible as we grow older; and we are
confronted with the problem of how to keep care and dreariness away,
how to avoid becoming mere trudging wayfarers, dully obsessed by all
we have to do and bear. Can we not find some medicine to revive the
fading emotion, to renew the same sort of delight in new thoughts and
problems which we found in childhood in all unfamiliar things, to
battle with the dreariness, the daily use, the staleness of life?

The answer is that it is possible, but only possible if we take the
same pains about it that we take to provide ourselves with comforts,
to save money, to guard ourselves from poverty. Emotional poverty is
what we most of us have to dread, and we must make investments if we
wish for revenues. We are many of us hampered, as I have said, by the
dreariness and dulness of the education we receive. But even that is
no excuse for sinking into melancholy bankruptcy, and going about the
world full of the earnest capacity for woe, disheartened and
disheartening.

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