Poetry | Page 3

only that he may render it a more perfect obedience. "Let me know," he craves, "that I may accept my fate intelligently, even though it prove that under the iron rule of Necessity I have no more freedom of will than the dead,
_Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course?With rocks, and stones, and trees._"
The claim (as Man must think) is a just one--for why was he given intelligence if not to use it? And even though disallowed as presumptuous, it is an instinctive one. Man is, after all, a part of the Universe, and just as surely as the Pleiades or Arcturus: and moreover he feels in himself a harmony correspondent with the greater harmony of his quest. His heart beats to a rhythm: his blood pulses through steady circuits; like the plants by which he is fed, he comes to birth, grows, begets his kind, dies, and returns to earth; like the tides, his days of gestation obey the moon and can be reckoned by her; in the sweat of his body he tills the ground, and by the seasons, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, his life while it lasts is regulated. But above all he is the microcosm, the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense cosmic circle focusses itself as the sun upon a?burning-glass--and he is not shrivelled up by the miracle! Other creatures (he notes) share his sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not his intelligence--or, if at all, in no degree worth measuring. So far as he can detect, he is not only an actor in the grand cosmic pageant, but the sole intelligent spectator. As a poor Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, wrote of the small town of his childhood:--
_The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, their skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars; and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it...._
_But little did the infant dream?That all the treasures of the world were by;?And that himself was so the cream?And crown of all which round about did lie.?Yet thus it was: the Gem,
The Diadem,?The ring enclosing all?That stood upon this earthly ball,
The heavenly Eye,?Much wider than the sky?Wherein they all included were,?The glorious soul that was the King,?Made to possess them, did appear?A small and little thing!_
We may safely go some way even beyond this, and lay it down for unchallengeable truth that over and above Man's consciousness of being the eye of the Universe and receptacle, however imperfect, of its great harmony, he has a native impulse to merge himself in that harmony and be one with it: a spirit in his heart (as the Scripture puts it) "of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father_"--And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father._ In his daily life he is for ever seeking after harmony in avoidance of chaos, cultivating personal habits after the clock; in his civic life forming governments, attempting hierarchies, laws, constitutions, by which (as he hopes) a system of society will work in tune, almost automatically. When he fights he has learnt that his fighting men shall march in rhythm and deploy rhythmically, and they do so to regimental music. If he haul rope or weigh anchor, setting out to sea, or haul up his ship on a beach, he has proved by experiment that these operations are performed more than twice as easily when done to a tune. But these are dull, less than half-conscious, imitations of the great harmony for which, when he starts out to understand and interpret it consciously, he must use the most godlike of all his gifts. Now the most godlike of all human gifts--the singular gift separating Man from the brutes--is speech. If he can harmonise speech he has taught his first and peculiar faculty to obey the great rhythm: "I will sing and give praise," says the Psalmist, "with the best member that I have." Thus by harmonising speech (in a fashion we will discuss by and by), he arrives at Poetry.

But an objection may be raised. "Is the tongue, rather than the brain, the best member that I have?" or (to put it in another way), "Surely a man's thoughts about the Universe have more value than his words about it?"
The answer is, that we cannot separate them: and Newman has put this so cogently that I must quote him, making no attempt to water down his argument with words of my own. "Thought and speech are inseparable from one another. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinking