Platform Monologues | Page 8

flavour of melancholy, in which the writer saw and felt it. For myself I

know that the passage brings back to me, exactly and perfectly, not
only a mental picture, but also a frame of mind, which I can recognize
across the years which now separate me from those English "garden
walks and all the grassy floor" strewn with "blossoms red and white of
fallen May and chestnut flowers."
If you have never experienced precisely that frame of mind, you cannot,
of course, appreciate the literary power, any more than you can
appreciate Shelley's all-exquisite
The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light for ever
shines, earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to
fragments--
unless you have pondered the mystery of life and eternity somewhat as
he had done.
Yes! that must be premised all through. You must have had your own
mood of profound world-weariness, before you can appreciate the utter
completeness of the cry of Beatrice Cenci:--
"Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be No God, no
Heaven, no Earth in the void world, The wide, gray, lampless, deep
unpeopled world!"
The highest attainment then of literary power is the "exquisite
expression of exquisite--that is to say, rarely intense or
subtle--impressions." The language, said Wordsworth, should be the
"incarnation of the thought." The highest gift of the writer is to make
his words and their combinations not clever, not dazzling, not merely
lucid, but to make them, by their meanings, their associations, and their
musical effects, exactly reproduce what he thinks and sees and feels,
just in the special light in which he thinks and sees and feels it.
This involves, of course, a perpetual struggle between thought and
language. Language is for ever striving to overtake thought and feeling.
Browning indeed may say:--

Perceptions whole, like that he sought To clothe, reject so pure a work
of thought As language.
But in this we must not acquiesce. Browning himself, indeed, however
immense his range of sympathies, however extraordinary his dramatic
insight, falls far short in the purely literary gift. He is not a master of
language as Shakespeare was or as Tennyson was. Extremist votaries of
Browning are accustomed to say either that he is not obscure at all, or
else that his obscurities are inseparable from the thoughts. We must not
admit this latter plea until we are prepared to call Isaiah and
Shakespeare shallower than Browning.
The transcendent literary artist is always compelling language to
express what it had seemed incapable of expressing. Indeed the
"advance of literature" often means no more than a greater degree of
success in giving recognizable shape to the hitherto vague and elusive,
in communicating what was supposed to be incommunicable. Often,
when we say that such and such a writer gives us "new glimpses," or
"opens up new thoughts," it only means that he has discovered how to
express such thoughts, so that we can realize and recognize them. He is
not an inventor, but a revealer.
And the highest revealer is the great poet. Poetry is language and music.
Musicians tell us that music is intended to impart what language cannot
express--something unspeakably more delicate, more subtle,
emotionally more powerfully or more tranquillizing. But music must
not aim at too much. It cannot really describe action or define thoughts;
it can only translate feelings and moods into sounds. Now just as music
is always advancing, always endeavouring to fulfil more perfectly the
functions of art--which are, as I have said, to communicate the spirit of
one human being to his fellows--so language also is ever struggling to
enlarge its powers and to do what musicians tell us music alone can do.
Language, too, must translate feeling, and moods, but into words. It in
a sense invades the region of music. And herein lies the
justification--the necessity--for poetry, or for a prose which is virtually
poetry in its language and movement and imagination. Poetry, in that
broad sense, must always be the literary form for the expression of that

which is most difficult to express, I mean of anything which is
pervaded by a rare exaltation and passion of feeling, or by a delicate
grace and charm.
* * * * *
Some people pretend to think that poetry is a wholly artificial thing;
that it is merely a pleasing trick, when it is not an irritating trick, with
language. Well, alas! it is quite natural that many stern spirits should be
irritated by verses; for it is entirely true that nine-tenths of what is
being, or has been, written in verse might better have been written in
prose, or rather not written at all. The young author, and, for the matter
of that,