A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (ereader with android TXT) đź“–
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“Painting is the expression of certain sensations,” said Carolus Duran. “You should not seek merely to copy the model that is posed before you, but rather to take into account the impression that is made upon the mind…. Take careful account of the substances that you must render—wood, metal, textures, for instance. When you fail to reproduce nature as you feel it, then you falsify it. Painting is not done with the eyes, but with the brain.”
W. W. Story, the sculptor, wrote: “Art is art because it is not nature…. The most perfect imitation of nature is therefore not art. It must pass through the mind of the artist and be changed. Art is nature reflected through the spiritual mirror, and tinged with all the sentiment, feeling, passion of the spirit that reflects it.”
In John La Farge’s Considerations on Painting, a little book which is full of suggestiveness to the student of literature, there are many passages illustrating the conception of art as “the representation of the artist’s view of the world.” La Farge points out that “drawing from life is an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the moment is merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings, former aspirations, former habits, images that we have cared for, and through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entire educated part of our nature.”
One of La Farge’s concrete examples must be quoted at length: [Footnote: Considerations on Painting, pp. 71-73. Macmillan.]
“I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men,
artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all
the time, how to do this and how to do that; but absolutely
different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they
wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they
were well known to the public are concerned.
“What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was
merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the hills that lay
before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in
any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention
to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to
express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds
rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and
meadow-land below us, and the ground fell away suddenly before us.
Well, our three sketches were, in the first place, different in
shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of
drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually
indicates—as you know, or ought to know—whether we are looking far
or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more
nearly a square; the distance taken in to the right and left was
smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and
down—that is to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of
sky above—was greater. In each picture the clouds were treated with
different precision and different attention. In one picture the open
sky above was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the
upper sky was of no consequence—it was the clouds and the mountains
that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same, that is to say,
the general make of things; but each man had involuntarily looked
upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight; and though
the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously
preferred a beauty or an interest of things different from what his
neighbour liked.
“The colour of each painting was different—the vivacity of colour
and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole;
and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen
of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent
on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes.
“I wish you to understand, again, that we each thought and felt as if
we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first
desire of expressing ourselves, and I think would have been very
much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. And
we were each one true to nature…. If you ever know how to paint
somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of the student who has
not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of
his brain, you will always give to nature, that is to say, what is
outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see
it—which is yourself.”
Such bits of testimony from painters help us to understand the brief sayings of the critics, like Taine’s well-known “Art is nature seen through a temperament,” G. L. Raymond’s “Art is nature made human,” and Croce’s “Art is the expression of impressions.” These painters and critics agree, evidently, that the mind of the artist is an organism which acts as a “transformer.” It receives the reports of the senses, but alters these reports in transmission and it is precisely in this alteration that the most personal and essential function of the artist’s brain is to be found.
Remembering this, let the student of poetry now recall the diagram used in handbooks of psychology to illustrate the process of sensory stimulus of a nerve-centre and the succeeding motor reaction. The diagram is usually drawn after this fashion:
Sensory stimulus Nerve-centre Motor Reaction ________________________________O______________________________
––––––—> ––––––—>
The process is thus described by William James: [Footnote: Psychology, Briefer Course, American Science Series, p. 91. Henry Holt.]
“The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical irritant, be this as
gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the
waves of light, convey the excitement to the nervous centres. The
commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but discharges
through the efferent nerves, exciting movements which vary with the
animal and with the irritant applied.”
The familiar laboratory experiment irritates with a drop of acid the hind leg of a frog. Even if the frog’s brain has been removed, leaving the spinal cord alone to represent the nervous system, the stimulus of the acid results in an instant movement of the leg. Sensory stimulus, consequent excitement of the nerve centre and then motor reaction is the law. Thus an alarmed cuttlefish secretes an inky fluid which colors the sea-water and serves as his protection. Such illustrations may be multiplied indefinitely. [Footnote: See the extremely interesting statement by Sara Teasdale, quoted in Miss Wilkinson’s New Voices, p. 199. Macmillan, 1919.] It may seem fanciful to insist upon the analogy between a frightened cuttlefish squirting ink into sea-water and an agitated poet spreading ink upon paper, but in both cases, as I have said elsewhere, “it is a question of an organism, a stimulus and a reaction. The image of the solitary reaper stirs a Wordsworth, and the result is a poem; a profound sorrow comes to Alfred Tennyson, and he produces In Memoriam.” [Footnote: Counsel upon the Reading of Books, p. 219. Houghton Mifflin Company.]
In the next chapter we must examine this process with more detail. But the person who asks himself how poetry comes into being will find a preliminary answer by reflecting upon the relation of “impression” to “expression” in every nerve-organism, and in all the arts. Everywhere he must reckon with this ceaseless current of impressions, “the stream of consciousness,” sweeping inward to the brain; everywhere he will detect modification, selections, alterations in the stream as it passes through the higher nervous centres; everywhere he will find these transformed “impressions” expressed in the terms of some specific medium. Thus the temple of Karnak expresses in huge blocks of stone an imagination which has brooded over the idea of the divine permanence. The Greek “discus-thrower” is the idealized embodiment of a typical kind of athlete, a conception resulting from countless visual and tactile sensations. An American millionaire buys a “Corot” or a “Monet,” that is to say, a piece of colored canvas upon which a highly individualized artistic temperament has recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as it has been interpreted by Corot’s or Monet’s eye and brain and hand. A certain stimulus or “impression,” an organism which reshapes impressions, and then an “expression” of these transformed impressions into the terms permitted by some specific material: that is the threefold process which seems to be valid in all of the fine arts. It is nowhere more intricately fascinating than in poetry.
“The more I read and re-read the works of the great poets,
and the more I study the writings of those who have some
Theory of Poetry to set forth, the more am I convinced that
the question What is Poetry? can be properly answered only if
we make What it does take precedence of How it does it.”
J. A. STEWART, The Myths of Plato
In the previous chapter we have attempted a brief survey of some of the general aesthetic questions which arise whenever we consider the form and meaning of the fine arts. We must now try to look more narrowly at the special field of poetry, asking ourselves how it comes into being, what material it employs, and how it uses this material to secure those specific effects which we all agree in calling “poetical,” however widely we may differ from one another in our analysis of the means by which the effect is produced.
Let us begin with a truism. It is universally admitted that poetry, like each of the fine arts, has a field of its own. To run a surveyor’s line accurately around the borders of this field, determining what belongs to it rather than to the neighboring arts, is always difficult and sometimes impossible. But the field itself is admittedly “there,” in all its richness and beauty, however bitterly the surveyors may quarrel about the boundary lines. (It is well to remember that professional surveyors do not themselves own these fields or raise any crops upon them!) How much map-making ingenuity has been devoted to
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