A Study of Poetry | Page 5

chance to manifest
itself. He is wholly man only when he "plays," that is, when he is free
to create. Herbert Spencer and many subsequent theorists have pointed
out the analogy between the play of young animals, the free expression
of their surplus energy, their organic delight in the exercise of their
muscles, and that "playful" expenditure of a surplus of vitality which
seems to characterize the artist. This analogy is curiously suggestive,
though it is insufficient to account for all the phenomena concerned in
human artistic production.
The play theory, again, suggests that old and clairvoyant perception of
the Greeks that the art-impulse deals with aesthetic appearances rather
than with realities as such. The artist has to do with the semblance of
things; not with things as they "are in themselves" either physically or
logically, but with things as they appear to him. The work of the
impressionist painter or the imagist poet illustrates this conception. The
conventions of the stage are likewise a case in point. Stage settings,
conversations, actions, are all affected by the "_optique du théâtre_"
they are composed in a certain "key" which seeks to give a harmonious

impression, but which conveys frankly semblance and not reality. The
craving for "real" effects upon the stage is anti-aesthetic, like those
gladiatorial shows where persons were actually killed. I once saw an
unskilful fencer, acting the part of Romeo, really wound Tybalt: the
effect was lifelike, beyond question, but it was shocking.
From this doctrine of aesthetic semblance or "appearance" many
thinkers have drawn the conclusion that the pleasures afforded by art
must in their very nature be disinterested and sharable. Disinterested,
because they consist so largely in delighted contemplation merely.
Women on the stage, said Coquelin, should afford to the spectator "a
theatrical pleasure only, and not the pleasure of a lover." Compare with
this the sprightly egotism of the lyric poet's
"If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?"
A certain aloofness is often felt to characterize great art: it is perceived
in the austerity and reserve of the Psyche of Naples and the Venus of
Melos:
"And music pours on mortals
Its beautiful disdain."
The lower pleasures of the senses of taste and touch, it is often pointed
out, are less pleasurable than the other senses when revived by memory.
Your dinner is your dinner--your exclusive proprietorship of lower
pleasure--in a sense in which the snowy linen and gleaming silver and
radiant flowers upon the table are not yours only because they are
sharable. If music follows the dinner, though it be your favorite tune, it
is nevertheless not yours as what you have eaten is yours. Acute
observers like Santayana have denied or minimized this distinction, but
the general instinct of men persists in calling the pleasures of color and
form and sound "sharable," because they exist for all who can
appreciate them. The individual's happiness in these pleasures is not
lessened, but rather increased, by the coexistent happiness of others in
the same object.
There is one other aspect of the artistic impulse which is of peculiar
importance to the student of poetry. It is this: the impulse toward

artistic creation always works along lines of order. The creative
impulse may remain a mystery in its essence, the play of blind instinct,
as many philosophers have supposed; a portion of the divine energy
which is somehow given to men. All sorts of men, good and bad,
cultured and savage, have now and again possessed this vital creative
power. They have been able to say with Thomas Lovell Beddoes:
"I have a bit of fiat in my soul,
And can myself create my little
world."
The little world which their imagination has created may be represented
only by a totem pole or a colored basket or a few scratches on a piece
of bone; or it may be a temple or a symphony. But if it be anything
more than the mere whittling of a stick to exercise surplus energy, it is
ordered play or labor. It follows a method. It betrays remeditation. It is
the expression of something in the mind. And even the mere whittler
usually whittles his stick to a point: that is, he is "making" something.
His knife, almost before he is aware of what he is doing, follows a
pattern--invented in his brain on the instant or remembered from other
patterns. He gets pleasure from the sheer muscular activity, and from
his tactile sense of the bronze or steel as it penetrates the softer wood.
But he gets a higher pleasure still from his pattern, from his sense of
making something, no matter how idly. And as soon as the pattern or
purpose or "design" is recognized by others the maker's pleasure is
heightened, sharable. For he