A Study of Poetry | Page 4

not trouble himself overmuch at the
outset with definitions of Beauty. The chief thing is to become aware of
the long and intimate preoccupation of men with beautiful objects and
to remember that any inquiry into the nature and laws of poetry will
surely lead him into a deeper curiosity as to the nature and
manifestations of aesthetic feeling in general.
2. The Impulse to Artistic Production
Furthermore, no one can ask himself how it is that a poem comes into
being unless he also raises the wider question as to the origin and
working of the creative impulse in the other arts. It is clear that there is
a gulf between the mere sense of beauty--such as is possessed by
primitive man, or, in later stages of civilization, by the connoisseur in
the fine arts--and the concrete work of art. Thousands enjoy the statue,
the symphony, the ode; not one in a thousand can produce these objects.
Mere connoisseurship is sterile. "The ability to produce one fine line,"
said Edward FitzGerald, "transcends all the Able-Editor ability in this
ably-edited universe." What is the impulse which urges certain persons
to create beautiful objects? How is it that they cross the gulf which
separates the enjoyer from the producer?
It is easier to ask this question than to find a wholly satisfactory answer
to it. Plato's explanation, in the case of the poet, is simple enough: it is

the direct inspiration of the divinity,--the "god" takes possession of the
poet. Perhaps this may be true, in a sense, and we shall revert to it later,
but first let us look at some of the conditions for the exercise of the
creative impulse, as contemporary theorists have endeavored to explain
them.
Social relations, surely, afford one of the obvious conditions for the
impulse to art. The hand-clapping and thigh-smiting of primitive
savages in a state of crowd-excitement, the song-and-dance before
admiring spectators, the chorus of primitive ballads,--the crowd
repeating and altering the refrains,--the rhythmic song of laboring men
and of women at their weaving, sailors' "chanties," the celebration of
funeral rites, religious processional and pageant, are all expressions of
communal feeling, and it is this communal feeling--"the sense of joy in
widest commonalty spread"--which has inspired, in Greece and Italy,
some of the greatest artistic epochs. It is true that as civilization has
proceeded, this communal emotion has often seemed to fade away and
leave us in the presence of the individual artist only. We see Keats
sitting at his garden table writing the "Ode to Autumn," the lonely
Shelley in the Cascine at Florence composing the "West Wind,"
Wordsworth pacing the narrow walk behind Dove Cottage and
mumbling verses, Beethoven in his garret writing music. But the
creative act thus performed in solitude has a singular potency, after all,
for arousing that communal feeling which in the moment of creation
the artist seems to escape. What he produces in his loneliness the world
does not willingly let die. His work, as far as it becomes known, really
unites mankind. It fulfills a social purpose. "Its function is social
consolidation."
Tolstoy made so much of this "transmission of emotion," this
"infectious" quality of art as a means of union among men, that he
reduced a good case to an absurdity, for he argued himself into thinking
that if a given work of art does not infect the spectator--and preferably
the uneducated "peasant" spectator--with emotion, it is therefore not art
at all. He overlooked the obvious truth that there are certain types of
difficult or intricate beauty--in music, in architecture, and certainly in
poetry--which so tax the attention and the analytical and reflective

powers of the spectator as to make the inexperienced, uncultured
spectator or hearer simply unaware of the presence of beauty.
Debussy's music, Browning's dramatic monologues, Henry James's
short stories, were not written for Tolstoy's typical peasant. They would
"transmit" to him nothing at all. But although Tolstoy, a man of genius,
overstated his case with childlike perversity, he did valuable service in
insisting upon emotion as a basis for the art-impulse. The creative
instinct is undeniably accompanied by strong feeling, by pleasure in the
actual work of production and in the resultant object, and something of
this pleasure in the harmonious expression of emotion is shared by the
competent observer. The permanent vitality of a work of art does
consist in its capacity for stimulating and transmitting pleasure. One
has only to think of Gray's "Elegy" and the delight which it has
afforded to generations of men.
Another conception of the artistic impulse seeks to ally it with the
"play-instinct." According to Kant and Schiller there is a free "kingdom
of play" between the urgencies of necessity and of duty, and in this
sphere of freedom a man's whole nature has the