A Study of Poetry, Bliss Perry [books to read to improve english .txt] 📗

terms of color or line or sound. He learns or may learn in time, as Whistler bade him, “never to push a medium further than it will go.” The chief value of Lessing’s epoch-making discussion of “time-arts” and “space-arts” in his Laokoon consisted in the emphasis laid upon the specific material of the different arts, and hence upon the varying opportunities which one medium or another affords to the artist. But though human curiosity never wearies of examining the inexhaustible possibilities of this or that material, it is chiefly concerned, after all, in the use of material as it has been moulded by the fingers and the brain of a particular artist. The material becomes transformed as it passes through his “shop,” in some such way as iron is transformed into steel in a blast furnace. An apparatus called a “transformer” alters the wave-length of an electrical current and reduces high pressure to low pressure, or the reverse. The brain of the artist seems to function in a somewhat similar manner as it reshapes the material furnished it by the senses, and expresses it in new forms. Poetry furnishes striking illustrations of the transformations wrought in the crucible of the imagination, and we must look at these in detail in a subsequent chapter. But it may be helpful here to quote the testimony of two or three artists and then to examine the psychological basis of this central function of the artist’s mind.

“Painting is the expression of certain sensations,” said Carolus Duran. “You should not seek merely to copy the model that is posed before you, but rather to take into account the impression that is made upon the mind…. Take careful account of the substances that you must render—wood, metal, textures, for instance. When you fail to reproduce nature as you feel it, then you falsify it. Painting is not done with the eyes, but with the brain.”

W. W. Story, the sculptor, wrote: “Art is art because it is not nature…. The most perfect imitation of nature is therefore not art. It must pass through the mind of the artist and be changed. Art is nature reflected through the spiritual mirror, and tinged with all the sentiment, feeling, passion of the spirit that reflects it.”

In John La Farge’s Considerations on Painting, a little book which is full of suggestiveness to the student of literature, there are many passages illustrating the conception of art as “the representation of the artist’s view of the world.” La Farge points out that “drawing from life is an exercise of memory. It might be said that the sight of the moment is merely a theme upon which we embroider the memories of former likings, former aspirations, former habits, images that we have cared for, and through which we indicate to others our training, our race, the entire educated part of our nature.”

One of La Farge’s concrete examples must be quoted at length: [Footnote: Considerations on Painting, pp. 71-73. Macmillan.]

 

“I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men,

artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all

the time, how to do this and how to do that; but absolutely

different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they

wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they

were well known to the public are concerned.

 

“What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was

merely a memorandum of a passing effect upon the hills that lay

before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves, or of studying in

any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention

to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to

express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds

rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and

meadow-land below us, and the ground fell away suddenly before us.

Well, our three sketches were, in the first place, different in

shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of

drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually

indicates—as you know, or ought to know—whether we are looking far

or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more

nearly a square; the distance taken in to the right and left was

smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and

down—that is to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of

sky above—was greater. In each picture the clouds were treated with

different precision and different attention. In one picture the open

sky above was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the

upper sky was of no consequence—it was the clouds and the mountains

that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same, that is to say,

the general make of things; but each man had involuntarily looked

upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight; and though

the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously

preferred a beauty or an interest of things different from what his

neighbour liked.

 

“The colour of each painting was different—the vivacity of colour

and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole;

and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen

of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent

on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes.

 

“I wish you to understand, again, that we each thought and felt as if

we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first

desire of expressing ourselves, and I think would have been very

much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. And

we were each one true to nature…. If you ever know how to paint

somewhat well, and pass beyond the position of the student who has

not yet learned to use his hands as an expression of the memories of

his brain, you will always give to nature, that is to say, what is

outside of you, the character of the lens through which you see

it—which is yourself.”

Such bits of testimony from painters help us to understand the brief sayings of the critics, like Taine’s well-known “Art is nature seen through a temperament,” G. L. Raymond’s “Art is nature made human,” and Croce’s “Art is the expression of impressions.” These painters and critics agree, evidently, that the mind of the artist is an organism which acts as a “transformer.” It receives the reports of the senses, but alters these reports in transmission and it is precisely in this alteration that the most personal and essential function of the artist’s brain is to be found.

Remembering this, let the student of poetry now recall the diagram used in handbooks of psychology to illustrate the process of sensory stimulus of a nerve-centre and the succeeding motor reaction. The diagram is usually drawn after this fashion:

Sensory stimulus Nerve-centre Motor Reaction ________________________________O______________________________

––––––—> ––––––—>

The process is thus described by William James: [Footnote: Psychology, Briefer Course, American Science Series, p. 91. Henry Holt.]

 

“The afferent nerves, when excited by some physical irritant, be this as

gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the

waves of light, convey the excitement to the nervous centres. The

commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but discharges

through the efferent nerves, exciting movements which vary with the

animal and with the irritant applied.”

The familiar laboratory experiment irritates with a drop of acid the hind leg of a frog. Even if the frog’s brain has been removed, leaving the spinal cord alone to represent the nervous system, the stimulus of the acid results in an instant movement of the leg. Sensory stimulus, consequent excitement of the nerve centre and then motor reaction is the law. Thus an alarmed cuttlefish secretes an inky fluid which colors the sea-water and serves as his protection. Such illustrations may be multiplied indefinitely. [Footnote: See the extremely interesting statement by Sara Teasdale, quoted in Miss Wilkinson’s New Voices, p. 199. Macmillan, 1919.] It may seem fanciful to insist upon the analogy between a frightened cuttlefish squirting ink into sea-water and an agitated poet spreading ink upon paper, but in both cases, as I have said elsewhere, “it is a question of an organism, a stimulus and a reaction. The image of the solitary reaper stirs a Wordsworth, and the result is a poem; a profound sorrow comes to Alfred Tennyson, and he produces In Memoriam.” [Footnote: Counsel upon the Reading of Books, p. 219. Houghton Mifflin Company.]

In the next chapter we must examine this process with more detail. But the person who asks himself how poetry comes into being will find a preliminary answer by reflecting upon the relation of “impression” to “expression” in every nerve-organism, and in all the arts. Everywhere he must reckon with this ceaseless current of impressions, “the stream of consciousness,” sweeping inward to the brain; everywhere he will detect modification, selections, alterations in the stream as it passes through the higher nervous centres; everywhere he will find these transformed “impressions” expressed in the terms of some specific medium. Thus the temple of Karnak expresses in huge blocks of stone an imagination which has brooded over the idea of the divine permanence. The Greek “discus-thrower” is the idealized embodiment of a typical kind of athlete, a conception resulting from countless visual and tactile sensations. An American millionaire buys a “Corot” or a “Monet,” that is to say, a piece of colored canvas upon which a highly individualized artistic temperament has recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as it has been interpreted by Corot’s or Monet’s eye and brain and hand. A certain stimulus or “impression,” an organism which reshapes impressions, and then an “expression” of these transformed impressions into the terms permitted by some specific material: that is the threefold process which seems to be valid in all of the fine arts. It is nowhere more intricately fascinating than in poetry.