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LUCID LITERATURE
NOTHING can make up in a writer for the want of lucidity. It is one of the cardinal literary virtues. If the page is not clear, if we see through it as through a glass darkly, if there is the least blur or opacity, the work to that extent is condemned. It is a false notion that some thoughts or ideas are necessarily obscure, or complex, or involved. Ideas are what we make them. If we think obscurely, our ideas are obscure; if one’s mental activity is complex, his ideas are complex. Always is the mind of the writer the medium through which we see his matter. Such a poet as George Meredith thinks obscurely. There is a large blind spot in his mind, so that at times an almost total eclipse passes over his page. Strain one’s vision as one may, one cannot make out just what he is trying to say. Then there are lucid intervals—strong, telling lines; then the shadow falls again and the reader is groping in the dark. The difficulty is never innate in his subject, but is in the poet’s use of language, as if at times he caught at words blindly and used them without reference to their accepted meanings, as when be says of the skylark, “Hedrinkshis hurriedflight and drops.” How can one adjust his mind to the notion of a bird drinking its own flight?
Or take this puzzle:—
“Vermilion wings, by distance heldTo pause aflight while fleeting swift,And high aloft the pearl inshelledHer lucid glow in glow will lift.”
“Vermilion wings, by distance heldTo pause aflight while fleeting swift,And high aloft the pearl inshelledHer lucid glow in glow will lift.”
“Vermilion wings, by distance heldTo pause aflight while fleeting swift,And high aloft the pearl inshelledHer lucid glow in glow will lift.”
“Vermilion wings, by distance held
To pause aflight while fleeting swift,
And high aloft the pearl inshelled
Her lucid glow in glow will lift.”
Does not the reading of such lines set one’s head in a whirl?
The impression of novelty can never be made by a trick in the use of language, nor can the sense of mystery be given by obscurity of expression. Veils and screens and dim lights may do it in the world of sense, but not in the world of ideas. The reader feels all the time that there is something in the way, and that he would see clearly if the writer thought clearly. Freshness and novelty are the gifts of the writer whose mind is fresh and who has lively and novel emotions in the presence of everyday things and events.
There is a sense of mystery in much of the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and in our own Emerson and Whitman, but little or none of the Meredithian blur and opacity. One may not at once catch the full meaning of Wordsworth’s “Ode to Immortality,” or Tennyson’s “Tiresias” or “Ancient Sage,” or Emerson’s “Brahma,” or Whitman’s “Sleep Chasings,” but how transparent the language, how unequivocal the emotion, how direct and solid the expression! There is a vast difference between the impression or want of impressionmade by a commonplace thought veiled and hidden by ambiguity of phrase, and that made by “something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” Great poets give us a sense of depth and height, of the far and the rare. Meredith does at times, but oftener he gives us only a sense of the dense and the foggy.
There are two reasons why we may not understand a man. In one case the fault is in him,—in his clouded and ambiguous way of thinking, such as I have already spoken of. In the other case the fault, or rather the difficulty, is in us. The man may live and move upon a different spiritual plane, he may have an atmosphere and cherish ideals that belong to another world than ours. Thus the solid men of Boston did not understand Emerson, but said their daughters did. The daughters were habitually more familiar with Emerson’s ideal values than the fathers were. Thus Scott said he did not understand Wordsworth, could not follow his “abstruse ideas;” Campbell suited him better. Scott belonged to another type of mind than that of Wordsworth’s, lived in another world. There was no sense of mystery in his mind,—of that haunting, elusive something which Wordsworth felt in all outward nature. There was no religion in Scott’s love of nature, and it is this probably that baffled him in Wordsworth. Both were born countrymen and equal lovers of common, rural things, but Wordsworth associated them with his spiritual and ideal joys and experiences, while Scott found inthem an appeal to his copious animal spirits, and his love of sensuous beauty. Wordsworth would understand Scott much better than Scott would understand Wordsworth. The ancient poets probably would not understand the moderns nearly as well as the moderns understand the ancients. We are further along on the road of human experience.
Then, we may understand a work and not appreciate it, not respond to its appeal. Appreciation is based upon kinship. We are more in sympathy with some types of mind than with others of equal parts. The most impersonal and judicious of critics cannot escape the law of elective affinities. Some booksfindus more than others of similar merit. See how people differ, and are bound to differ, about Whitman, and it is because his aim is not merely to give the reader poetic truth disassociated from all personal qualities and traits, but to give him himself. We cannot separate the poet from the man, and if we do not respond to the man, to his type, to his quality, to his wholesale and radical democracy, we shall not respond to the poet. If we all read authors only through our taste inbelles lettres, through our love of literary truth, we should agree in our estimate of them according as our tastes agreed. But the feeling we bring to them is very complex. Character, predisposition, natural affinities, race traits, all play a part. We are very apt to agree about such a poet as Milton, because the personal element plays so small a part in his poetry. If we do not get poetic truth in himwe do not get anything. His style is the main thing, as it is with the Greek poets. In other words, there is nothing in Milton that makes a personal appeal. One cannot conceive of any reader taking him to his heart, appropriating him, and finding his life colored and changed by him, as by some later poets. Wordsworth was a revelation to Mill; Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman have in the same way been revelations to many readers, and for the same reason,—their intense individual point of view. Their appeal is a personal and a religious one as well as a poetic. No one who has not something of the modern pantheistic feeling toward nature will be deeply touched by Wordsworth. No one who has not felt the burden of modern problems, the decay of the old faiths, will be moved by Arnold’s poetry. His “sad lucidity of soul” belongs to our age. No one who has not broken away from the old traditions in art and religion and in politics, and possessed himself emotionally of the point of view afforded by modern science, will make much of Whitman. Without a certain mental and spiritual experience and a certain stamp of mind Emerson will not be much to you. In Poe one’s sense of artistic forms and verbal melody are alone appealed to. He is more to a Frenchman than to an American. If you are ahungered for the bread of life do not go to Poe, do not go to Landor or to Milton, do not go to the current French poets. Go sooner to Goethe, to Tennyson, to Browning, to Arnold, to Whitman,—the great personal poets, the men whohave spiritual and religious values as well as poetic. All the great imaginative writers of our century have felt, more or less, the stir and fever of the century, and have been its priests and prophets. The lesser poets have not felt these things. Had Poe been greater or broader he would have felt them, so would Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to touch the formative currents of our social or religious or national life. In the past the great artist has always been at ease in Zion; in our day only the lesser artists are at ease, unless we except Whitman, man of unshaken faith, who is absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the breadth of his vision and the depth and universality of his sympathies.