A Study of Poetry | Page 6

has accomplished the miracle: he has
thrown the raw material of feeling into form--and that form itself yields
pleasure. His "bit of fiat" has taken a piece of wood and transformed it:
made it expressive of something. All the "arts of design" among
primitive races show this pattern-instinct.
But the impulse toward an ordered expression of feeling is equally
apparent in the rudimentary stages of music and poetry. The striking of
hands or feet in unison, the rhythmic shout of many voices, the regular
beat of the tom-tom, the excited spectators of a college athletic contest
as they break spontaneously from individual shouting into waves of
cheering and of song, the quickened feet of negro stevedores as some
one starts a tune, the children's delight in joining hands and moving in a

circle, all serve to illustrate the law that as feeling gains in intensity it
tends toward ordered expression. Poetry, said Coleridge, in one of his
marvelous moments of insight, is the result of "a more than usual state
of emotion" combined "with more than usual order."
What has been said about play and sharable pleasure and the beginning
of design has been well summarized by Sidney Colvin:
[Footnote:
Article on "The Fine Arts" in Encyclopaedia Britannica.]
"There are some things which we do because we must; these are our
necessities. There are other things which we do because we ought;
these are our duties. There are other things which we do because we
like; these are our play. Among the various kinds of things done by
men only because they like, the fine arts are those of which the results
afford to many permanent and disinterested delight, and of which the
performance, calling for premeditated skill, is capable of regulation up
to a certain point, but that point passed, has secrets beyond the reach
and a freedom beyond the restraint of rules."
3. "Form" and "Significance" in the Arts
If the fine arts, then, deal with the ordered or harmonious expression of
feeling, it is clear that any specific work of art may be regarded, at least
theoretically, from two points of view. We may look at its "outside" or
its "inside"; that is to say at its ordering of parts, its pattern, its "form,"
or else at the feeling or idea which it conveys. This distinction between
form and content, between expression and that which is expressed, is
temptingly convenient. It is a useful tool of analysis, but it is dangerous
to try to make it anything more than that. If we were looking at a
water-pipe and the water which flows through it, it would be easy to
keep a clear distinction between the form of the iron pipe, and its
content of water. But in certain of the fine arts very noticeably, such as
music, and in a diminished degree, poetry, and more or less in all of
them, the form is the expression or content. A clear-cut dissection of
the component elements of outside and inside, of water-pipe and water
within it, becomes impossible. Listening to music is like looking at a
brook; there is no inside and outside, it is all one intricately blended

complex of sensation. Music is a perfect example of "embodied
feeling," as students of aesthetics term it, and the body is here
inseparable from the feeling. But in poetry, which is likewise embodied
feeling, it is somewhat easier to attempt, for purposes of logical
analysis, a separation of the component elements of thought (i.e.
"content") and form. We speak constantly of the "idea" of a poem as
being more or less adequately "expressed," that is, rendered in terms of
form. The actual form of a given lyric may or may not be suited to its
mood,
[Footnote: Certainly not, for instance, in Wordsworth's
"Reverie of Poor Susan."]
or the poet may not have been a
sufficiently skilful workman to achieve success in the form or "pattern"
which he has rightly chosen.
Even in poetry, then, the distinction between inside and outside,
content and form, has sometimes its value, and in other arts, like
painting and sculpture, it often becomes highly interesting and
instructive to attempt the separation of the two elements. The French
painter Millet, for instance, is said to have remarked to a pupil who
showed him a well-executed sketch: "You can paint. But what have you
to say?" The pupil's work had in Millet's eyes no "significance." The
English painter G. F. Watts often expressed himself in the same fashion:
"I paint first of all because I have something to say.... My intention has
not been so much to paint pictures that will charm the eye as to suggest
great thoughts that will appeal to the imagination and the heart and
kindle all that is best and noblest in humanity.... My work