Platform Monologues | Page 6

forms and colours and fragrance in apt
and expressive terms and comparisons, which seem to paint it before
your eyes. The other plods and halts and fails, and leaves no clear
impression. If to the one the flower is just red and pointed, to the other
it is, perhaps, a tongue of flame. The one has but literal facts to tell, the
other is full of imagination and similitude.
Take a step higher. Have you seen and heard the lark, and studied his
movements and his song aloft in the sky of Europe? Can you express
simply what you then saw and heard, so that all who have witnessed the

same can see and feel it over again? How many words would you take,
and how vivid might your picture be? Then compare your effort with
Shelley's famous
Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest, Like a cloud of
fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still doth soar, and
soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are
bright'ning, Thou dost float and run, Like an unbodied joy whose race
is just begun!
Another step, and we come to a region no longer of outward description,
but of thought, of feeling, of delicate fancy, of soaring imagination.
I suppose thousands upon thousands of persons possessed of what our
great-grandfathers used to call "sensibility," have felt at eventide, when
alone in certain spots, a kind of subduing awe, as if some great
spirit-existence pervading all nature were laying a solemn hush upon
the world. In various degrees one here and one there can express that
feeling, but how many can express it as simply and yet effectually as
Wordsworth does:--
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free; The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its
tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea: Listen! the
mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A
sound like thunder--everlastingly!
* * * * *
To express and body forth: there is room for the manifestation of this
prime literary gift in all sort of subjects. It may be shown in a fable of
Æsop, in Robinson Crusoe, in a children's story, in Mark Twain's
boyish experiences on the Mississippi, in a Barrack-room Ballad of
Rudyard Kipling, in Thackeray's Esmond, in Shelley's Ode to a Skylark,
in either a comedy of Shakespeare or his Hamlet, in a sonnet of Dante's
Vita Nuova or in his Inferno. Æsop's communication of his point of

view is final. So is Defoe's communication of mental pictures. So is
Mark Twain's of that Mississippi pilotage. So is Kipling's in his Drums
of the Fore and Aft, or his Mandalay. These men are all admirable
literary artists in their own domains. Each fulfils all that is demanded of
his art. If we could keep this fact clearly before us, our judgments of
writers might be more discriminating. Do we think Kipling possessed
of an extraordinary degree of the literary gift? Who could think
otherwise, seeing that he can effect exactly what he sets out to effect by
means of words? His scenes and his thoughts--such as they are--start
forth living before us. But do we then think a Kipling proved equal to a
Shakespeare in sheer excellence of his gift? That is another question.
The things which Shakespeare realizes and expresses demand powers
of realization and expression more far-reaching and more subtle than
are required by those things to which a Kipling gives shape and form.
In Shakespeare are multitudes of deep and rare reflections, vivid
imaginings, penetrations of sympathy and insight, and all so clearly
crystallized, with such apparent ease, that they become ours at once, as
if they were natural to us. His communication of the most subtle states
of mind is complete. But in a Kipling we cannot pretend that there is
infinite subtlety and elusiveness, that there is a cosmic condensing of a
whole nebula of spiritual experience. His task was less hard.
And what then of Homer? Can we call his task a difficult one? Is he,
too, full of infinitely delicate or far-reaching thoughts and feelings? No.
But his aim is to reproduce all the freshness and breeziness of a fresh
and breezy atmosphere, to make us live again amid all that simple
wholesome strenuousness of the childhood of the western world. That,
too, is exceedingly elusive, and almost impossible to
catch--immeasurably more difficult than all those coarsely, if
strenuously, marked characteristics of the British soldier and other bold
figures on the canvas of Kipling.
That, I believe, is the right attitude to assume, when we endeavour to
measure the literary power of one writer against that of another--if we