THE POET AND HIS TEACHERS

9

less little note, and while the seasonable chorus blends, it is humored by some and endured by most, quite as a matter of course, and the world goes on as usual. Human suffering may have been greater when the rhapsodist flourished and printing was unknown, when one was waylaid at the corners of the market-place, and there was no escape but in flight or assassination. And if our object were to train poets, and a past-master were on the rostrum, his teachings would be futile unless nature reassorted her averages. Fourier accounted for one poet in his phalanstery of a thousand souls; yet a shrewder estimate would allow but one memorable poet to a thousand phalansteries, in spite of the fact that even nature suspends her rules in countenance of youth's prerogative, and unfailingly supplies a laureate for every college class. With respect to training, the catalogues term a painter the pupil of Bonnat, of Duran, of Cabanel; a musician, pupil of Rubinstein or Liszt. But the poet studies in his own Nature both atelier. He is not made, his poetry is not made, by a priori rules, any more than a language is made by the grammarians and philologists, whose true function is simply to report it.

makes and

trains a poet.

Yet even the poet has his teachers: first of all, since poetry is vocal, those from whom he learns the speech wherewith he lisps in numbers. In the nursery, or on the playground, he is as much at school as any young artist taking his initial lessons in the drawing-class, or a young singer put to his first exer

V

cises. Later on, he surely finds his way to the higher gymnasium; he reads with wonder and assimilation the books of the poets. Thus not only his early methods, but his life-long expression, his vocabulary, his confines and liberties, will depend much upon early associations, and upon the qualities of the models which chance sets within his way. As to technical ability, what he seeks to acquire after the formative period relatively counts for little; his gain must come, and by a noble paradox, from learning to ✓ unlearn, from self-development; otherwise his utterance will never be a force. One poet's early song, for example, has closely echoed Keats; another's, Tennyson; afterward, each has given us a motive and a method of his own, yet he was first as much a pupil of an admirable teacher as those widely differing artists, Couture and Millet, were pupils of Delaroche. Still another began with the Italian poets, and this by a fortunate chance, or rather, let us say, by that mysterious law which decrees that genius shall find its own natural sustenance. In time he developed his own artistic and highly original note, with a spirituality confirmed by that early pupilage.

I assume, then, that the poet's technical modes, even the general structure of a masterwork, come by intuition, environment, reading, experience; and that too studious consideration of them may method. perchance retard him. I suspect that no instinctive poet bothers himself about such matters

The natural

DAME NATURE'S SCHOOL

II

in advance; he doubtless casts his work in the form and measures that come with its thought to him, though he afterward may pick up his dropped feet or syllables at pleasure. If he ponders on the Iambic Trimeter Catalectic, or any of its kin, his case is hopeless. In fact, I never have known a natural poet who did not compose by ear, as we say: and this is no bad test of spontaneity. And as for rules, — such, for example, as the Greeks laid down, their efficacy is fairly hit off in that famous epigram of the Prince de Condé, when the Abbé d'Aubignac boasted that he closely observed the rules of Aristotle: "I do not quarrel with the Abbé d'Aubignac for having so closely followed the precepts of Aristotle; but I cannot pardon the precepts of Aristotle that occasioned the Abbé d'Aubignac to write so wretched a tragedy." We do see that persons of cleverness and taste learn to write agreeable verses; but the one receipt for making a poet is in the safe-keeping of nature and the foreordaining stars.

view.

On the other hand, the mature poet, and no less the lover of poetry, may profitably observe One end in what secrets of nature are applied to lyrical creation. The first Creator rested after his work, and saw that it was good. It is well for an artist to study the past, to learn what can be done and what cannot be done acceptably. A humble music-master can teach a genius not to waste his time in movements proved to be false. Much of what is good is established, but the range of the good is infinite;

that which is bad is easily known. If there be a mute and to-be-glorious Milton here, so much the better. And for all of us, I should think, there can be no choicer quest, and none more refining, than, with the Muse before us, to seek the very well-spring and to discover the processes of her "wisdom married to immortal verse."

Artistic reserve.

We owe to the artist's feeling that his gift is innate, and that it does produce" an illusion on the eye of the mind" which, he fears, too curious analysis may dispel: to this we doubtless owe his general reluctance to talk with definiteness concerning his art. Often you may as well ask a Turk after his family, or a Hindu priest concerning his inner shrine. I have put to several minstrels the direct question, "What is poetry?" without obtaining a categorical reply. said, "I can't tell you just first-class example of it, I'll of Lyrics and Madrigals. But when they do give us chips from their workshop, the table-talk of poets, the stray sentences in their letters, — these, like the studio-hints of masters, are both curt and precious, and emphatically refute Macaulay's statement that good poets are bad critics. They incline us rather to believe with Shenstone that "every good poet includes a critic; the reverse" (as he added) "will not hold."

One of them, indeed, now, but if you need a refer you to my volume

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Even a layman shares the artist's hesitation to

WHY ANSWER IS EVADED

13

The heritage

of all,

discourse upon that which pertains to human emotion. Because sensation and its causes are universal, the feeling that creates poetry for an expression, and the expression itself, in turn exciting feeling in the listener, are factors which we shrink from reducing to terms. An instinctive delicacy is founded in nature. To overcome it is like laying hands upon the sacred ark. One must be assured that this is done on the right occasion, and that, at least for the moment, he has a special dispensation. A false handling cheapens the value of an art — puts out of sight, with the banishment of its reserve, what it might be worth to us. All have access to the universal elements; they cost nothing, are at the public service, and even children and witlings can toy with and dabble in them. So it is with music, poetry, and other general expressions of feeling. Most people can sing a little, any boy can. whistle and latterly, I believe, any girl who would defy augury, and be in the fashion. Three fourths of the minor verse afloat in periodicals or issued in pretty volumes corresponds to the poetry of high feeling and imagination somewhat as a boy's whistling to a ravishing cavatina on the Boehm flute. Ast a further instance, a knack of modelling comes by nature. If sculptor's clay were in every road-bank, and casts from the antique as common as school readers and printed books of the poets, we probably should have reputed Michelangelos and Canovas in every village instead of here and there a Ward, a St. Gaudens, or a Donoghue.