Chapter VI

“Il ne faut pas chercher la vérité; mais devant un homme comprendre quelle est sa vérité.” We must not seek in a man’s work for the truth, since there are as many truths as brains; but it is worth while to define an answer here and an answer there out of the many. What is the answer of Remy de Gourmont? _Quelle est sa vérité?_ Of what kind is his truth? Does he bring rosemary for remembrance or poppy for oblivion? Not in what he says, but in the point from which he says it, we must look for our indications. His life, like _Sixtine_, is a “roman de la vie cérébrale.” It is the spectacle of a man whose conquests are won by understanding. For him the escape of mysticism was inadequate, and an invitation to cowardice. He would not abdicate, but, since those empires are unstable whose boundaries are fixed, conquer continually. The conquests of the mind are not won by neglect. It is not sufficient to refuse to see. The conqueror must see so clearly that life blushes before his sober eyes, and, understood, no longer dominates. Remy de Gourmont has suffered and conquered his suffering in understanding it. He would extend this dominion. He would realise all that happens to him, books, a chance visitor, a meeting in the street, the liquid bars of light across the muddy Seine. He would transmute all into the mercurial matter of thought, until, at last impregnable, he should see life from above, having trained his digestive powers to the same perfection as his powers of reception. Although one of the Symbolists, he has moved far from the starting-point assigned to that school by Mr. Symons. His books are not “escapes from the thought of death.” The thought of death is to him like any other thought, a rude playfellow to be mastered and trained to fitness for that free and harmonious game. The life of the brain, the noblest of all battles, that of a mind against the universe which it creates, has come to seem more important to him than the curiosities of beauty of which he was once enamoured. It has, perhaps, made him more of a thinker than an artist. In his desire to conquer his obsessions he has sometimes lost sight of the unity that is essential to art, a happy accident in thought. His later books have been the by-products of a more intimate labour. He has left them by the road whose end he has not hoped to reach, whose pursuit suffices him. They wake in the reader a desire which has nothing to do with art. This desire--a desire for intellectual honesty--and with that, perhaps, for intellectual gaiety, is the characteristic gift of his work. It is never offered alone. He accompanies it with criticism, with witty epilogues, serious dissertations, and licentious little stories; but it is not so much for the sake of these things as for the stimulus of that desire that we turn, and seldom in vain, to M. de Gourmont’s books.

1911.

THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI

THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI

So-shi, a Chinese philosopher, dreamed that he was a butterfly, and, in the moment of waking, asked himself: “Are you So-shi who has dreamed that he was a butterfly, or are you a butterfly who is dreaming that he is So-shi?” That question is continually repeated in the works of Yone Noguchi, who seems, indeed, to have the freedom of two worlds, and to find reality as often in one as in the other. Noguchi is for ever in doubt of his own existence, suspicious of appearances, and searching for the reality in things beyond touch or description. “My soul,” he writes:

“My soul, like a chilly winged fly, roams about the sadness-walled
body, hunting for a casement to fly out.
Lo, suddenly, an inspired bird flies upright into the atom-eyed sky!
Alas, his reflection sinks far down into the mileless bottom of the
mirrory rivulet!
Is this world the solid being?--or a shadowy nothing?
Is the form that flies up the real bird? or the figure that sinks
down?”

And again:

“The world is not my residence to the end!
Alas, the moon has lost her way, harassed among the leaf-fellows on
the darkling hill-top!
Isn’t there chance for my flying out?”

The world is not too much with this poet of Japan who writes in our language, and it is interesting to compare this symbolist of a nation of conscious symbolists with the few men who in France and England have turned an unconscious but almost universal practice into a theory of poetry.[12]

But I must not, in my care for his work, pretend that the poet is the immaterial floating fairy that he almost seems to be. “I have cast the world,” he says, “and think me as nothing,

“Yet I feel cold on snow-falling day,
And happy on flower day.”

Let me, before saying more, set down such facts as I know about his physical existence.

Yone Noguchi was born in Japan about 1876. He was in America before he was twenty, and, in company with a few other Japanese students, suffered extreme poverty, and the starvation which those who have not tried it consider so efficacious a stimulant to the soul. He made some friends among American writers, and stayed for a time with Joaquin Miller. In 1897 he published _Seen and Unseen: or Monologues of a Homeless Snail_, and in the next year _The Voice of the Valley_, a little book inspired by a stay in the Yosemite. In 1902 he came to England, and lived with Mr. Yoshio Markino (who had not then realised himself and London in his water-colours) in poor lodgings in the Brixton Road. From these lodgings he issued a sixteen-page pamphlet of verse printed on brown paper, which drew such notice that the Unicorn Press (an unfortunate little firm that published some very good books, some bad ones, and died) produced a volume, called, like the pamphlet, _From the Eastern Sea_, and containing, besides those sixteen pages of poetry, other verses from the American books and a number of new pieces. The cover of this edition was designed by Mr. Yoshio Markino. I knew Noguchi at this time, and often walked with him along the Embankment in the evenings, or under those “lamp-lights of web-like streets bathed in the opiate mists,” that he and Yoshio Markino have used so delicately in their several arts. I remember him as a small man, though perhaps not noticeably small by Japanese standards, with black hair less orderly and geometrical in growth than most Japanese hair, and a face of extraordinary sensitiveness, high-browed but with broadly set eyes, and a mouth like a woman’s, like that of a woman controlling some almost tearful emotion. Even in the handling of a cigarette, whose end he stripped of its paper so that the tobacco might serve in the making of another (we were almost penniless in those days), there was a delicacy that made it impossible not to recognise that he was a man who lived more finely than most. His conversations were of poetry, of the principles of the particular poetry he held that it was his to write, and of the works of those English poets he had read. “I hate your Longfellow,” he said, “and I love your Keats,” and in contrasting the two he was, perhaps, defining to himself an important tendency of his own.

He left London in 1903, and went to New York and then to Japan. He had some difficulties there, difficulties, I believe, of misunderstanding on the part of his own countrymen. He crossed to the mainland and travelled in China for a year, and perhaps longer. In 1906 he published _The Summer Cloud_ in Tokio, and, in June last year, he sent me a two-volume book in a blue case with small ivory fastenings, printed by the Valley Press in Kamakura. This book, _The Pilgrimage_, has been issued in England by Mr. Elkin Mathews.

These five books do not contain a large body of verse, but they contain verse whose interest for us is not concentrated in the nationality of the writer. The title of the brown-paper pamphlet published in the Brixton Road is _From the Eastern Sea_, “by Yone Noguchi (_Japanese_),” but though that word aroused a careless curiosity, the curiosity was turned into something more valuable by qualities less incidental. The imagery of Noguchi’s verse is Japanese in feeling, just as the imagery in Synge’s plays is Irish, and that of Verlaine’s poetry French, but the imagery in any one of these three cases would have been worthless if the man who used it had been merely Japanese, Irish, or French, and not a man of genius with the gift of setting words free with living breath. Our concern is not with the nationality of this writer, but with his conception of the poet, and with his poetry.

Noguchi wrote his first book in 1896, and so had not read Mr. Arthur Symons’ _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, which was issued three years later. He would have found there an account of poets not unlike himself, and of a poetry nearer than Keats’ to his own, and further removed than Keats’ from that of the hated Longfellow.

Symons, writing of Verlaine, says: “Is not his whole art a delicate waiting upon moods, with that perfect confidence in them as they are, which is a large part of ordinary education to discourage in us, and a large part of experience to repress? But to Verlaine, happily, experience taught nothing; or rather it taught him only to cling the more closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate part of our spiritual life.” Noguchi lives almost continuously in those moods; experience with him is momentary rather than cumulative; and his aim, expressed more than once in his verse, is only to keep himself a vessel as clear as possible for the unsullied transference of those moments from the bowl of life to that of art. It will not be difficult to make from his verses a portrait of his ideal poet, and, in writing of a man not yet very widely known, I believe I shall best be doing my duty by him in quoting his own words as often as I can. In _The Poet_ he says:

“The roses live by the eating of their own beauty and then die.
His song is the funeral chant for his own death of every moment.”

And again, of himself:

“I sing the song of my heart-strings, alone in the eternal muteness,
in the face of God.”

And again:

“The God-beloved man welcomes, respects as an honoured guest, his own
soul and body in his solitude.
Lo! the roses under the night dress themselves in silence, and
expect no mortal applaud--content with that of their voiceless
God.”

And again:

“O, wash me and wash me again with thy light,
And burn my body to a flame of soul!
It is this moment that I conquer the intervention of flesh,
And its rebellions that worked in me at unexpected time.
It’s not too much to say I am a revelation or a wonder,
Winging as a falcon into the breast of loveliness and air.”

And again:

“... What a bird
Dreams in the moonlight is my dream,
What a rose sings is my song.”

“O, to lose the world and gain a song,” he cries, and then, “I am glad to be no-man to-day, with the laughter and dance of the sea soul.” His thoughts fall like leaves in autumn “on the snowy cheeks of his paper.” His is the poetry of self-abnegation, of identification of himself with the world. His soul dances “on the silver strings” of the rain. “We,” he sings, are “happy to be biographers of each other, I and a bird.” He flies himself as a kite, to be lifted or let fall by the winds that do not move at all those whose pride is in their sage and measured footsteps on the ground.

In the last of his volumes there are a few specimens of Japanese seventeen-syllabled verse, _hokku_, and in a note Noguchi writes that such a poem “in Japanese mind, might be compared with a tiny star, I dare say, carrying the whole sky at its back. It is like a slightly open door, where you may steal into the realm of poesy. Its value depends on how much it suggests. The Hokku poet’s chief aim is to impress the reader with the high atmosphere in which he is living.” The Hokku poet, like Noguchi, never writes of the thing about which he is writing. The emotions he wishes to express are too subtle for description in words, and can only be written of in the spaces between the lines, just as between the petals of a flower we may find dreams that the flower has never known, and the suggestions of something less ponderable than the earth in which it had its roots. An example of Hokku poetry will illustrate the method of all Noguchi’s:

“Where the flowers sleep,
Thank God! I shall sleep to-night.
Oh, come, butterfly.”

That is valuable as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a pearl to be dissolved in the wine of a mood. Pearls are not wine, nor in themselves to be thought of as drink, but there is a kind of magic in the wine in which they are dissolved.

In Noguchi’s poems there is the co-operation between silence and speech of which Carlyle was thinking when he wrote: “In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore by Silence and Speech acting together, comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their union be!” In many poems of the French symbolists the Speech is almost meaningless, except in the Silence that is covered by its melody. In Noguchi both Speech and Silence are full of a charm that we can scarcely find in life but in fortunate rare moods. He writes:

“I am stirring the waves of Reverie with my meaningless but
wisdom-wreathed syllables.”

But he is incapable of denying his own charm to the carefully-worded accompaniment of the Silence with which he is really concerned. He sees the world with eyes too guileless not to make it alive, even when using it as an invocation. He sees ideas too clearly not to make them, even in a spell, independently vivid for his listeners. For an example of the one take this picture:

“Alas, the mother cow, with matron eyes, utters her bitter heart,
kidnapped of her children by the curling gossamer mist!”

For an example of the other, this idea:

“The Universe, too, has somewhere its shadow; but what about my
songs?
An there be no shadow, no echoing to the end--my broken-throated
lute will never again be made whole.”

He is a poet whose flame has been so scrupulously tended as to flicker with the slightest breath. He is as many-mooded as the combinations between sunshine and shadow. His poetry actually _is_ the thing that has induced a mood in him, trimmed of all that he has had to remove for himself, and so made into something between nature and that pure elevation of mind from which Noguchi feels. This quality of pale flame-like emotion is common to all his poems, extraordinarily various as they are.

Sometimes he speaks with grandeur, as in these lines:

“When I am lost in the deep body of the mist on a hill,
The universe seems built with me as its pillar!
Am I the God upon the face of the deep, nay deepless deepness in the
beginning?”

Sometimes wistfully:

“Alas! my soul is like a paper lantern, its paste wetted off under
the rain.
_My love, wilt thou not come back to-night?_
Lo, the snail at my door stealthily hides his horns.
_Oh, put forth thy honourable horns for my sake!
Where is Truth? Where is Light?_”

Sometimes questioning:

“My poetry begins with the tireless songs of the cricket, on the lean
grey-haired hill, in sober-faced evening.
And the next page is Stillness----
And what then, about the next to that?
Alas, the God puts his universe-covering hand over its sheets!
_Master, take off your hand for the humble servant!_
Asked in vain:----
How long for my meditation?”

But it is impossible with the quotations permissible in an article to give an adequate presentment of a poet whose poems are so separate that a hundred of them do not suffice for his expression. Noguchi has, like Verlaine, escaped the wisdom of experience; his latest moods are as sky-clear as his first, different though they are in technique and in feeling. Each one of them is a glint of light from a diamond; it is impossible, but in seeing innumerable glints together, satisfactorily to perceive the diamond itself.

Noguchi’s technique is his own, though it would be possible to find in reminiscent phrases suggestions of influence. A man using English words with something of the surprising daring of the Irish peasants on whose talk Mr. Synge modelled his prose, using them, too, like a foreigner who has fallen in love with them, he is able to give them a morning freshness newer and stranger than is given them (though the words of all fine writers are newly discovered) by men whose ancestors have bandied them about. He uses them in short and long lines that, in his later books, learn more and more of rhythm. Rhyme he has not attempted, and it would, I think, have hampered the butterfly-flash of his verse from thought to thought. In _The Summer Cloud_ many of the poems of his early books are altered to prose simply by the plan of their printing. The type is differently set on the page and they are called prose poems. I do not know what led Noguchi to make this experiment, but it proved that the irregular, broken lines in which his poems were originally published had a real power over the effect the words produced. The spaces between the lines were a kind of thought punctuation, and the mind needed these moments between the little, breathless, scarcely-worded sighs that make his poems. In reading them aloud it becomes clear that the ritual of the line-spacing was more important than that of commas or full-stops. Noguchi’s songs are like bird flights, timing themselves with the pulse of the mind that follows them. His ideal is a poetry of pure suggestion whose melody shall be of thought, capricious and uncertain as the mind, but only with the mind’s caprice, the mind’s uncertainty. The following poem was printed as prose in _The Summer Cloud_, and as it stands here in _The Pilgrimage_.

“Little Fairy,
Little Fairy by a hearth,
Flight in thine eyes,
Hush on thy feet,
Shall I go with thee up to Heaven
By the road of the fire-flame?

Little Fairy,
Little Fairy by a river,
Dance in thy heart,
Longing at thy lips,
Shall I go down with thee to “Far-Away,”
Rolling over the singing bubbles?

Little Fairy,
Little Fairy by a poppy,
Dream in thy hair,
Solitude under thy wings,
Shall I sleep with thee to-night in the golden cup
Under the stars?”

It is easy, in reading it aloud, to recognise that its form is not accidental, but follows, breath for breath, the movements of the mind.

But who shall analyse charm, or separate the tints of the opal? In writing of Noguchi, I am writing of something that can only be defined by itself. I can only take shred after shred from the cloak of gossamer he has woven for himself, and only hope in doing so to persuade other readers to buy his books and find for themselves a hundred shreds as beautiful as these. The frontispiece to _The Pilgrimage_ is a reproduction of a drawing by Utamaru, a thing of four pale colours and a splash of black, and made as light as wind by curves as subtle and as indefinable as those traced by worshipping stars round the object of their adoration. I had forgotten that it is the picture of a girl, and that fact is, indeed, as immaterial as the titles of Noguchi’s poems. In looking at it, I forget not only its subject, but the book in which it is, for this art, of poet or painter, Verlaine, Noguchi, Utamaru, Whistler, frees us, infecting us with its own freedom, from the world which is too much with us, for the exploration of that other world of dream which, unless we, too, are children, is with us so fitfully, and so seldom.

“Beckoned by an appointed hand, unseen yet sure, in holy air
We wander as a wind, silver and free,
With one song in heart, we, the children of prayer.

Our song is not of a city’s fall;
No laughter of a kingdom bids our feet wait;
Our heart is away, with sun, wind, and rain:
We, the shadowy roamers on the holy highway.”

1909.

KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH

KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH

Definitions, like mythologies, wear out. It is then important to replace them. Aladdin’s wife had a choice, but we have none. We must change our old lamps for new, or sit in the dark. A natural philosopher who retained the mythological definition of thunder could not speak of lightning to young men who had learnt of electricity without an air of irrelevance of which he might be quite unconscious. Not so his listeners, who would brush his explanations impatiently aside as soon as they knew the beliefs on which he based them. Whenever historians or critics seem irrelevant, we are safe in assuming a difference between their definitions and our own. When they seem irrelevant to many people beside ourselves, we can go further and assume that their definitions are either worn out or not yet accepted. Sometimes, of course, they are without definitions either old or new, but then they need not trouble us, for they disappear like cuttle-fishes in the darkness of their own ink. There is at the present day a widespread dissatisfaction with historians of literature. It is impossible not to feel that their dicta do not matter, that their sense of perspective is wrong or uncertain, that their books are of no use to us except as bibliographies. A new definition of literature is needed, that shall give them some scale, some standard to which they can refer. For without such standard or scale, they can do no more than gossip, or judge poetry by its passion, by its sense, by its smoothness, or by any other half-remembered scrap from a definition that is no longer adequate.

If we would get rid of these irrelevancies, and write histories of literature that shall deal with the matter of which they propose to treat, we must find a new standard of values, and to find that we must make a new definition. We must have a statement of the nature of literature applicable not to the books of one nation of one time only, but to those of all nations and of all times. It must supply us with terms in which we can state the aims of widely different schools and writers, with regard to their medium and not to any accidental quality. If it is to do that we must escape from the prejudices of our own time (which may be invisible to us) by seeking our formula in a definition of the medium common to all writers, a statement of the function of words in combination.

To make such a statement I have borrowed two epithets from the terminology of physical science. Energy is described by physicists as kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is force actually exerted. Potential energy is force that a body is in a position to exert. Applying these terms to language, without attempting too strict an analogy, I wish to define literature, or rather the medium of literature, as a combination of kinetic with potential speech. In this combination the two are coincident. There is no such thing in literature as speech purely kinetic or purely potential. Purely kinetic speech is prose, not good prose, not literature, but colourless prose, prose without atmosphere, the sort of prose that M. Jourdain discovered he had been speaking all his life. It says things. An example of purely potential speech may be found in music. I do not think it can be made with words, though we can give our minds a taste of it in listening to a meaningless but narcotic incantation, or a poem in a language that we do not understand. The proportion between kinetic and potential speech and the energy of the combination varies with different works and the literature of different ages. There is no literature to which it is impossible to apply the formula. Let us try to clarify it by example and particularisation.

It may be asked, what of ballad poetry in which there is much so stated as to approach purely kinetic speech? Does not the admitted power of a sea-song, a song whose words are utterly trivial, disprove our assertion? It does not; for to such songs or chanties the music to which they are sung has given a quality of potential speech, without which they would be worthless and speedily forgotten. In that case the words and the melody respectively represent kinetic and potential speech. It has been very truly said that a prima-donna can turn the alphabet to poetry by the emotional power of her voice.

It may further be asked by any one who has not clearly apprehended my meaning (and this would be more than excusable), Do I mean to suggest that literature is not literature unless it contains a double meaning? and, if so, do I not find in allegory the most perfect example of the simultaneous existence of kinetic and potential speech? This would indeed be a _reductio ad absurdum_. I must answer, that allegory (though it may represent the result of an early guess at the nature of art) is not necessarily poetry. There is, indeed, a gross and obvious duality of meaning in such a work as _The Faërie Queene_. The tale written on the paper enables us to reconstruct another. But that other might have been written with no greater difficulty. It does not aid, and may clog with external preoccupations, the tale that we sit down to read. It is an impertinent shadow, a dog that keeps too closely at our heels. Hazlitt rebukes those who think that the allegory of _The Faërie Queene_ will bite them. We are more afraid that it will lick our hands, and all we ask is, that it will allow itself to be forgotten. An acrostic sonnet may be a good sonnet, but we are not likely to perceive its excellence if we are intent upon the initial letters of the lines. No; allegory may be a rude attempt to copy in things said the duality of poetic speech. The old delight in conscious allegory may be comparable to the modern delight in conscious symbolism. But we must not forget for a moment that the resemblance is only one of analogy. When Spenser writes of Mammon’s cave:

“Both roof, and floor, and walls were all of gold
But overgrown with rust and old decay,
And hid in darkness that none could behold
The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day
Did never in that house itself display,
But a faint shadow of uncertain light;
Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away;
Or as the moon clothéd with cloudy night,
Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright.”

When he writes thus, we do not, in our search for potential speech, have to remember that he is writing of the love of money. Away with such tedious recollections. The stanza is like a picture by Rembrandt of an alchemist’s laboratory, where dusty alembic and smouldering fire mean far more than themselves. The lines say something, but we hear much for which they have not words. “The moon clothéd with cloudy night,” is not richer in suggestion than that same description. Not in the allegory but in the words themselves, their order and their melody, must we find, if they are to be literature, that combination of kinetic and potential speech.

Let me take another example of fine poetry, and show that it does perform in itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the first stanza of Blake’s “The Tiger”:

“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

It is impossible to deny the power of suggestion wielded by those four lines, a power utterly disproportionate to what is actually said. The kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed tiger of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and on either side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the phosphorescence of another speech, that we cannot so easily overhear. And who shall speak in fit terms of its potentiality? That glowing image, that surprised address; not in the enumeration of such things shall we come upon its secret.

The test of a formula is, that it shall fit. It must enable us to co-ordinate scattered knowledge, and throw into a clear perspective the jumble of loose statements and scraps of information whose value we cannot but recognise, although they have remained outside previous schemes and done little more than disturb the equilibrium of once-established theories. It is a comfort and a joy to a thinker when he can say that a formula of his has almost been proposed by minds that have approached his problem along roads other than his own. When he can find statements, true in themselves but inadequate, pegging out, as it were, the ground from which his formula has been dug, he can feel that it is no mere chance that has given it a momentary appearance of usefulness. He can speak of it with the solid confidence that it has behind it the collaboration of his predecessors.

We can bring such confidence to the use of this formula of kinetic and potential speech, for to whatever problem of literary theory or phenomenon of the history of literature we apply it, we find that it has been almost stated by those who have separately considered that problem or phenomenon. It smelts the ore that they have dug, and forges a weapon for the attack not of one problem, but of all.

For example; though kinetic speech may be translated without loss from one language to another, potential speech would not be potential but kinetic if we were able to express it otherwise than by itself. This is what Shelley means when he denies the possibility of the translation of poetry, though he does not perceive the full reason, but only that the poetic quality of a poem is partly dependent on a succession of inimitable sounds. His statement, incomplete though it is, is a recognition of the duality of poetic speech. He does not for a moment contend that we cannot render the meaning; he sees that the meaning is not all. The body is one thing and the soul is another. If we leave the soul behind we have nothing but dead matter, fit for manure or food. Life, or poetry, delicate-footed, mysterious, gracious with knowledge of her mystery, is passed away and we cannot recapture her.

Sometimes, indeed, she goes without our interference, and disappears only because of our neglect. There are poems that many men cannot perceive to be poetry. There are others, once poetry, now no longer so. Let us apply our formula to these phenomena, and first to the varying popularity of poetry, since our solution of this question will help us in solving the other. We shall find that the nearer poetry approaches to kinetic speech, the more easily is it apprehended by the multitude. Kinetic speech secures its effects by the presentation of facts, situations and stories, which are stuff not so fine as to slip through the coarse meshes of the general understanding. This explains the immediate and wide popularity of such poets as Longfellow, Scott, and Macaulay. Because prose, as a rule, depends more nearly on its kinetic than on its potential utterance, it is, as a rule, the more widely read. When, as in the hands of some nineteenth century writers, it emphasizes the potential element of speech it correspondingly narrows its public. Whenever poetry of high potentiality is read by a large public it will be found that its potential speech is condoned for them or hidden from them by more than usually vigorous kinetic speech. For potential speech secures its effects by suggestion. There is a bloom on its wings that a callous retina does not perceive. It is like a butterfly that has visited flowers and scatters their scent in its flight. The scent and the fluttering of its bloom-laden wings are more important than the direction or speed of its flying. It is always easier for the public to say, how fast, or where it is going than to notice these delicate things. The kinetic speech of a poem is understood by all; the potential depends for its apprehension upon the taste and knowledge of the reader. Words must have for us the associations that they had for the poet. We must be able to see them with his eyes, hear them with his ears, and taste their scents with nostrils not dissimilar to his. In time these things change. Unpopular poetry becomes quite popular, and indeed, no longer poetry, as it loses, through usage or forgetfulness, its proximity to the condition of potential speech. Accents are shifted from one to another syllable, and we should be deaf to the melody if we were unable to replace them. New meanings gather round the words, and they come back from later travels disguised in strange perfumes. The kinetic speech may be disturbed, but the potential has disappeared in a jargon of new sounds, a quarrel of new memories, and a chaos of new odours. Sometimes indeed, it is as if it had never existed.

In this light it is easy to understand the curious business of criticism, and to formulate an account of what occurs when poetry dies, or falls asleep like the princess in the wood, to be awakened after two centuries by a critic’s kiss. The Elizabethan dramatists lost their potential and were judged only by their kinetic speech during the eighteenth century. They were considered coarse and bloody-minded, because there is rapine and murder in their plays. Lamb restored to them the potentiality they had lost and turned bleak rock to flowering country. Spenser had become a mere monger of allegory, until Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt reconstituted him poet by discovering for themselves and others the attitude that restores to his kinetic its lost potential speech. Writers of Wordsworth’s generation realised, at least subconsciously, that a poem is not independent of knowledge. They tried to help us by printing at the head of a poem information about the circumstances of its conception. When a poet tells us that a sonnet was composed “on Westminster Bridge” or “suggested by Mr. Westell’s views of the caves, &c. in Yorkshire,” he is trying to ease for us the task of aesthetic reproduction to which his poem is a stimulus. He is trying to ensure that we shall approach it as he did, and hear as well as the kinetic the potential speech that he values. There is a crudity about such obvious assistance, and it would be quite insufficient without the wider knowledge on which we draw unconsciously as we read. But the crudity of those pitiable scraps of proffered information is not so remarkable as the dulness of perception that can allow a man to demand of a poem that it shall itself compel him accurately to enjoy it. It is possible that much of the old poetry that now seems to us no more than direct speech was once wrapped in a veil of suggestion. It is the critic’s business to rediscover those forgotten veils and to restore to the kinetic the magic of potential speech.

The formula of kinetic and potential speech illumines not only the critic’s business but also that of the historian. It enables him to link together in a single scheme the prose of Goldsmith with that of Pater and the poetry of the eighteenth century with poetry, like that of the Symbolists of the nineteenth, so different as to seem completely unrelated. It enables him to explain a phenomenon that he has usually alluded to as a mere curious accident, the fact that there have been ages when poetry has been popular and others in which it has been the possession of a few. It will, I think, be found that this periodicity coincides with a general variation between kinetic and potential speech. In the eighteenth century, when poetry was often rhymed prose, when the common standard of poetry was good sense, when she gave advice and said things, and did not seem to realise that there were things she could not say, when, in short, the kinetic almost overwhelmed the potential, then poetry was a popular form of literature. In other ages, when poetry has approached the condition of potential speech and so has needed for its appreciation such knowledge as that lately discussed, it has not swelled the publisher’s purse so swiftly as forms of literature that happened to be more nearly kinetic and so more easily enjoyed.

The eighteenth century poets and the Symbolists alike come under our definition and can be classed by the formula that depends upon it. I have suggested that the eighteenth century poets cared mostly for kinetic speech, and, indeed, carried their appreciation of it so high as sometimes to forget that poetry could do anything but speak wisely and well. Few schools have suffered a greater variety of imperfect and bungling definitions than that of Symbolism. The Symbolist aims have been described as “an escape from the thought of death,” and “intimacy with spiritual things.” Nowhere has there been a definition that has shown their relation to the aims of poetry in general. But, when Mallarmé says: “Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu; le suggérer, voilà le rêve,” he is saying, in other words, that poetry depends on potential speech. The Symbolists sought to write poetry that should be purely potential, and in the revision of certain of his poems Mallarmé tried to eliminate bit by bit the whole structure of kinetic speech that had been in them. The eighteenth century aims carried to their extreme would have meant bad prose; the Symbolist aims carried to their extreme would have meant (as they sometimes did) unintelligibility. Poetry is made by a combination of kinetic with potential speech. Eliminate either and the result is no longer poetry.

I do not propose the words kinetic and potential as terms of abuse or praise, though in different ages there have been artists who would have used them so. The eighteenth century poets would have used kinetic as a term of praise; the Symbolists would have used it as a term of abuse. The fact that different schools would have set different values on the words is itself a proof that they may be serviceable to historians and critics. Literature does indeed vary between these extremes, its kinetic quality preserving it from nonsense, its potential quality separating it from bad prose. Some sort of relevancy would be discoverable in any history that set itself to trace these variations. Some sort of relevancy is obvious in all criticism that attempts (as all good criticism does) the enhancement of the potential and the clarification of the kinetic element in such literature as happens to be its subject. In any case, an adoption of the definition of literature that this essay upholds would make ridiculous the classification of books by their subjects and of writers by their opinions, on which so many intellects have wasted time and vitality worthy of a more profitable employment.

1911.

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
Edinburgh & London

FOOTNOTES

[1] After passing this note for press, I learn that this essay has been reprinted at Tokyo in a new edition of Mr. Noguchi’s _The Pilgrimage_.

[2] For the reputation of Breughel d’Enfer is based on his imitations of his father, Breughel le Vieux, to whom is attributed the _Temptation of St. Anthony_ at Genoa.

[3] A piece of money coined by Charles VIII.

[4] Figures that strike the hour on the clock-tower at Dijon.

[5] The quotations in this essay are taken from Dr. Oscar Levy’s admirable English edition of Nietzsche, translated by Drs. W. A. Haussmann and M. A. Mügge, Messrs. Paul V. Cohn, Thomas Common, J. M. Kennedy, A. M. Ludovici and H. B. Samuel, and Miss Helen Zimmern: eighteen volumes published by Mr. T. N. Foulis.

[6] Clarendon Press. 1910.

[7] Oscar Wilde.

[8] These references are to the page-numbers in Messrs. Macmillan’s library edition.

[9] His inability to tell a story was perhaps the reason of, or, at least supplies a commentary upon, his readiness to admire the narratives of M. Filon, Octave Feuillet, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and to admire them, quite ingenuously, for the story’s sake, like the ordinary reader of novels.

[10] _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, 1899.

[11] An English translation was published in 1912 by Messrs. Stephen Swift.

[12] When I wrote this article I was still hypnotised, like the symbolists themselves, with the idea that symbolism was a method. My later article on kinetic and potential speech contains what I believe to be a more accurate account of the significance of what is called the “symbolist movement.” It did not turn a practice into a theory, but merely emphasized one of the two inseparable functions of words when combined in poetic speech, and emphasized it at the expense of the other.

Japanese poets have always insisted on the potential element in poetic speech. Its intensity has always been for them the test of a poem. Noguchi, except in that he is a Japanese poet who happens to write in English, is not an innovator but the heir to a long Japanese tradition.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Inconsistent use of accent marks has not been remedied.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Page 167: A superscript is represented as ^{me}.