Platform Monologues | Page 7

must do such a thing at all. It is not the morality or non-morality, the
importance or non-importance, the beauty or ugliness, inherent in what
is said, which determine the degree of the literary gift. It is rather the

relative elusiveness of the thing said, the difficulty of surrounding it, of
condensing it, of giving it perfect body, and communicating it in that
body. And that is why it is an error to put, let us say Gray, in the
foremost rank of literary artists. How well he does this thing! But was it,
after all, so transcendently difficult to do?
The vaguer, the deeper, the more comprehensive, the subtler the
thought or feeling or fancy, the greater demand is there upon the
literary power. One can say no more. It is as in sculpture, which finds it
infinitely easier to give embodiment to straining muscles and an
agonized face than to carve a statue in perfect restful beauty and with a
countenance of benign and strong tranquillity.
Ask a hundred people to write about the spring--simply to describe it
with its sights and sounds and odours--and most of them can perform
the task more or less well. Ask them to bring home the physical and
emotional influence of spring, and many of those who feel that
influence most keenly will give up the task. And then comes Chaucer
with his few touches, his "blissful briddes" and "fressche flowres," and
tells us how "full is my heart of revel and solace," and behold! the
passage breathes to the reader's heart the very spirit of youth and
springtide.
A simple statement of a simple fact calls for no "literary" gift. A
description of externals demands some, but not often a great, degree of
it. A thought or feeling, which is suggested by the fact or object, may
require either little or much in proportion as the thought or feeling is
fine and fugitive. But a mood induced by the thought or feeling
generally demands the gift in its highest degree. "A primrose by the
river's brim," whether "a yellow primrose 'tis to him," or a dicotyledon,
may be outwardly described more and less well; but we require for that
purpose only the rudiments of literary prose. But, next, there is the pure
and appealing beauty of the flower; and that evokes gathering
recognitions of the beauty of nature and its grace to us. Then upon this
there steals a feeling of exhilaration in the glad and gay atmosphere of
the re-awakening world; and this, again, may open into a whole vista of
recollections far back from childhood; and so the result may be one of

many moods. We have all this time been brought up a sort of gradient
of literary difficulty; and he is the supreme of supreme literary artists
who can body forth the most subtle of all these thoughts and moods.
Let me illustrate. Take for the purpose of contrast this passage of purely
external description from Cowper:--
Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcerned The cheerful haunts of
man, to wield the axe And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear, From
morn to eve his solitary task. Shaggy and lean and shrewd, with pointed
ears And tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur, His dog attends
him. Close behind his heel Now creeps he slow, and now with many a
frisk, Wide-scampering, snatches up the drifted snow With ivory teeth,
or ploughs it with his snout: Then shakes his powdered coat and barks
for joy--
and so forth. There you have clear and faithful observation, clearly and
faithfully reproduced. I do not want to depreciate the amount of literary
skill necessary for putting those right words in their right places.
Nevertheless I cannot bring myself to think it particularly remarkable.
The picture is distinct, but it is of the eye alone; it involves nothing in
the way of imagination, nothing in the way of subtle feeling blending
with the sight in the brain of the writer. Next take a stanza from
Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis:--
So, some tempestuous morn in early June, When the year's primal burst
of bloom is o'er, Before the roses and the longest day-- When garden
walks and all the grassy floor With blossoms red and white of fallen
May And chestnut flowers are strewn-- So have I heard the cuckoo's
parting cry, From the wet field, through the vext garden trees, Come
with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: "The bloom is gone, and
with the bloom go I."
Now to me that passage expresses something immeasurably more
difficult of expression. The whole tone of the environment is
reproduced in a few touches. We not only realize the scene, but we also
feel in its description the same mood of subtle pensiveness, with its