Stars and Clay.

New Zealand Times, Volume LI, Issue 11785, 22 March 1924, Page 11

Stars and Clay.

A DIALOGUE ON POETRY.

(By LOUIS H. VICTORY, F.R.S.L.)

Once upon a time I had a friendly controversy with the late Mr. Frank Morton, of ‘‘Triad” fame,<on some of the principles of poetry. The ideals were irreconcilable. They are re-presented in this dialogue.

FRANK! Let us forget this drab world! Have a cigarette, and let us talk of poetry. LOUIS: Yes; let us talk about that essay of yours, "The Art of Verse/"’ with the conclusions of which, as I have already told you, I am altogether at variance. I expected "light and leading"; but, instead of that, I find that you merely dogmatise in what I must regard as one of the most misleading and topsyturvy- articles I have ever read on the subject. Let us take 6ome of your statements: You say, for instance, that "poetry is not made." That is an assertion which is subversive of the theory and practice of the poets of all ages. So convinced were the Greeks that poetry IS "made" that they called the poet, not a poet, but a "maker." Wordsworth defined poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility/' and it must be admitted that the emotion which produces poetry is not made; but to say that the actual production of poetry is impulsive, or spontaneous, or instinctive, is sheer nonsense. It is conscious artifice, deliberate and premeditated. FRANK: You are, no doubt, sincere; but you are, perhaps, a little careless or dull. You quibble. Ido not, of course, deny that much good poetry is verse; but I ©imply assert (a thing obvious enough) that of the great mass of verso, most is not poetry. In short, to the making of poetry genius must go, and all the works of genius are inevitable, and not of mere arrangement. LOUIS: Remember the saying that genius is only the capacity for taking infinite pains! FRANK: Your citation of WordsWortn completely gives your case away. "Emotion recollected in tranquility" can have no connection with any manufacturing process. LOUIS: Nobody ever said it had. 1 distinctly averred that the emotion which produces poetry is NOT made. But tho emotional impulse is not the mado poem. FRANK: If you really think that poetry—true and noble poetry—is "con scious artifice, deliberate and, premeditated," then, so much the "Worse for you. The poetry of the great poets is noble because of its splendid literary and human quality, and not because of its mere petfection as verse. Of course, touch great verse is also great poetry. Who ever pretended that it is not?

LOUIS: Now it is you who are quibbling! At the same time, your words are an admission of the truth of my argument that the actual mechanism ol poetry is "conscious artifice"; while, to borrow your own words, "great poetry is noble because of its splendid literary and human quality." In other wordß, because it comes ''unmade" from the 6oul of the poet. But, why differentiate between poetry and verse at all ? You say, "Poetry is supreme and inevitable; it is the impulsive or instinctive revelation of certain influences or causes that combine to inspire the poet and compel production. Verse is quite a different thing: any man with a gift of writing can make verse." Now, if verse is not poetry, it has no reason for its existence, and you practically admit so much when you state that "to be convincing verse must have the quality of 'thrill/ Great verse shakes a man to the centre of his being." cVerse which is not convincing is absolutely valueless, while verse which has the quality of "thrill," which shakes a man to the centre of his being, is not only great verse, but great poetry. It is, therefore, idle to distinguish between the two: they are identical.

FRANK : Well, if your judgment is correct, you would sweep into oblivion, with one fell blow, whole volumes and libraries eft verse that has charmed and amused readers for generations. But, let us pass on to another, and still interesting, phase of my essay. I wrote — "Great verse lifts a man from the sordid trivialities and vile obsessions of the work-a-day plane, and puts him, for the moment, in touch with the infinite. Thus, it becomes easily apparent that LOVE is the proper theme of verse." LOUIS: There Ido not follow you. If you said "A proper theme of poetry" I would agree; but "the" proper tjieme, no! FRANK: All sentient life on this planet responds most surely and immediately to the thunderous appeal of the sexual instinct. LOUIS: Ah! That is a dictum which is absolutely contradicted by the practice of all tfie great poets who have ever written upon love. You confound the sexual instinct with Love—a thing no great poet has ever done. On the contrary, all the great bards have, in their love poems, tifensfigured Love as a spiritual power, far removed from anj thought or suggestion of ‘/sexual instinct." - Take, for example, the "Sonnets from the Portuguese," of Mrs Browning. No* Love is A, not THE, proper tneme oi verse; but "sexual instinct" as its theme is a "vile obsessiQn" truly. FRANK: Now I see the peering soul of the average Philistine peeping out through your theories. Love, between the sexes—love, that is, apart from family love, and apart from esteem and affection, neither of which is love at allhuman love, is essentially physical in its basis. Your pretence that all the great poets have regarded I*)ve as a something apart from sex, merely makes me wonder who all your "great poets" can be. Certainly, the love of Homor, and the Greek poets, of Virgil, of Petrarch, of Ariosto, of Tasso, not to mention scores of others, is intensely and magnificently sexual. Sappho, who carried lyric poetry to its superheat height of melody, was all aflame with sex. Will you pretend that Mrs Browning, in the field of great poetry, can be compared with Sappho? In any case, you must be blind, indeed, if you can eee no sex in the love of Mrs Browning's Sonnets.

, BOUT®: I aver that love and the sexual instinct are two quite different things, and that no great poet has ever deemed them to be identical. One of the greatest love stories that literature affords is the spiritual passion of Dante for Beatrice Portinari. I challenge you to show one passage in the "Vita Nuova," or in the Divina Commedia," which is tainted with any suggestion of sexual (or, in other words, animal) instinct. In these poems Dante describee his love, as one critic it, "in terms which make it dimoult to distinguish the real personality of Beatrice from some ideal power of beauty and virtue of which she is to Dante the symbol." And that, I take it, is how every great poet has regarded Love. Let me take Petrarch—one of the poets whoin you describe as "intensely and magnificently sexual." That statement

is an outrage upon tlie memory of a groat poet. As a matter of incontrovertible fact, the poems in which Laura is celebrated (his "Sonetti” and "Trionfi”) voice a sublime, purely platonic love; the "Trionfi” being a series of allegorical visions. There is not a suggestion of animalism about them. FRANK: To say that love and the sexual instinct are "quite different things” is—well, it seems to me to be letting loose an unspeakable absurdity, and putting a pretty pink ribbon of propriety on it to show that it is worthy of all good drapers* respect. Honestly, I cannot argue the matter, because I am afraid that you are a wicked wag trying to trick me into a preposterous controversy for the amusement of the populace. . You have yourself to blame if that idea is mistaken. If a man likes to be absolutely ont of focus with the feeling and the knowledge of his time, he must take the consequences. As to Dante—well, what nonsense it all is 1 In Dante's day every ipoet must worship an unattainable mistress. If Dante had once clasped his Beatrice, he would probably have found that he did not love her at all. If Dante and Petrarch loved these unattainable ladies 6o devoutly in cold fact—well, they had a queerish way of showing it; for neither of them went womanless to breakfast, or turned with scorn from accessible lips, unless we are to assume that accredited history does lie of them most damnably; How you love to drag in that word "animal”—which. of course, I never used. Of course, lam not at all ashamed of being an animal, but the purely animal instincts have nothing whatever to do with love. LOUIS: There you are, supporting my arguments! FRANK: The _ animals do not lovej they pair. Sex is a matter, not of an isolated lust, but of the whole man, his hopes, his dreams, his tendencies. In shorty I admit that the love of Petrarch for his Laura was "purely Platonic,” although I thought the phrase had died with other mid-Victorian things. In other words, it probably was not love at all. It was poetry in practice. LOUIS: Well, really, you are improving. You actually admit that "the purely animal instincts have nothing whatever to do with love,” and that the love of Petrarch was purely Platonic! lam beginning to have some hope for you. You asked me a few moments ago did I pretend that Mrs Browning, in the field of great poetry, can be compared with Sappho. I don't. The difference between them is this—‘Mrs 'Browning was a superb spiritual genius: Sappho was a depraved sensualist. The polished shell of Sappho's verse is of no account, since the kernel it covers is rotten. FRANK: It is absmrd for me to be drawn by a wag who pretends to see in Sappho, the poetess, "a depraved sensualist/' and who would have me believe that he can see nothing in the divinest poetry a woman ever wrote, but a "polished shell/' LOUIS: "Divinity of hell!'' One sonnet of Mrs Browning's, which gives the key to all her love poems, sufficiently demonstrates the futility of attempting to foist upon her the "sexual” obsession. It is this— How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight Foot the ends of Being and ideal grace I love thee to the level of eveiy day's Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; 1 love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints—l love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all tay life!—and, it God choose, I shall but loye thee better after death. There is nothing there of the "thunderous appeal of the sexual Then, with regard to such poetic giants as Homer (“Iliad” and "Odyssey”), iEschylus (who may be regarded as the creator of Oreek tragedy), Euripides# Sophocles, Virgil ("Eclogues/' "Jilneid,” "Georgies”), Ariosto ("Orlando Furioso” and comedies),, Tasso, Shakespeare and Milton, it is simply an affront to intelligent literary people, and an utter perversion of fact, to pretend that their work supports your "sexual” theory Where these poets deal with love, and especially in the dramatic poems involved in the consideration, they show its elevating and purifying power. When# on the other hand, they deal with animal passion, unillumined by love, they make no pretence that it is love: they paint it in its true colours, and ehow its consequences —as Shakespeare does in "Hamlet” in the characters of the King and Queen, and in ‘Antony and Cleopatra. It is interesting to note that a very large proportion of the best poetry does not deal with love in any aspect whatever. FRANK: I believe, and insist, that sex underlies all human activity and motive; and that, as you know perfectly w-ell, is the common scientific opinion. As to human love, if it is not sexual in its basis —well, on what, in God's name, is it based? From your way of thinking, there is no reason on earth why a man should not fall in love with his grandmother; there is no reason» apart from a desire to please Mr Roosevelt, why men and women should marry at all.

LOUIS: Well, will you answer this question—lf “Love between the sexes... .... human love, is essentially physical In its basis," what is the power which binds husband and wife together for long and happy years of beautiful and reverent friendship when physical attraction has died tne death that follows all human, things? FRANK: The answer is—" Beautiful and rererent friendship/'—and the afterglow. It is a pity that this is a subject one cannot discuss with any sort of candour; but it’s a nervoue world! As for Ariosto! but there, I should like to quote Ariosto; but I can't. You might be shocked! LOUIS: You are incorrigible. I can clearly see, as a result of our discue6ion, that you—in common with many othere who theorise decadently on the science of poetry—are unable to eee, or, what is worse, pretend that you are unable to see, the difference between stars and clay. FRANK: Well, worship your "stars.' Let me hare the "clay."