To roam at will, spring-heeled, high-hearted, and catching at all good fortunes, is the ambition of the youth, ere yet he has subdued himself to a destination.The principle of self-denial seems at first sight a treason done to genius, which was always privileged to be wilful.In this view literature is a fortuitous series of happy thoughts and heaven-sent findings.But the end of that plan is beggary.Sprightly talk about the first object that meets the eye and the indulgence of vagabond habits soon degenerate to a professional garrulity, a forced face of dismal cheer, and a settled dislike of strenuous exercise.The economies and abstinences of discipline promise a kinder fate than this.They test and strengthen purpose, without which no great work comes into being.They save the expenditure of energy on those pastimes and diversions which lead no nearer to the goal.To reject the images and arguments that proffer a casual assistance yet are not to be brought under the perfect control of the main theme is difficult;how should it be otherwise, for if they were not already dear to the writer they would not have volunteered their aid.
It is the more difficult, in that to refuse the unfit is no warrant of better help to come.But to accept them is to fall back for good upon a makeshift, and to hazard the enterprise in a hubbub of disorderly claims.No train of thought is strengthened by the addition of those arguments that, like camp-followers, swell the number and the noise, without bearing a part in the organisation.
The danger that comes in with the employment of figures of speech, similes, and comparisons is greater still.The clearest of them may be attended by some element of grotesque or paltry association, so that while they illumine the subject they cannot truly be said to illustrate it.The noblest, including those time-honoured metaphors that draw their patent of nobility from war, love, religion, or the chase, in proportion as they are strong and of a vivid presence, are also domineering - apt to assume command of the theme long after their proper work is done.So great is the headstrong power of the finest metaphors, that an author may be incommoded by one that does his business for him handsomely, as a king may suffer the oppression of a powerful ally.When a lyric begins with the splendid lines, Love still has something of the sea From whence his mother rose, the further development of that song is already fixed and its knell rung - to the last line there is no escaping from the dazzling influences that presided over the first.Yet to carry out such a figure in detail, as Sir Charles Sedley set himself to do, tarnishes the sudden glory of the opening.The lady whom Burns called Clarinda put herself in a like quandary by beginning a song with this stanza -Talk not of Love, it gives me pain, For Love has been my foe;He bound me in an iron chain, And plunged me deep in woe.
The last two lines deserve praise - even the praise they obtained from a great lyric poet.But how is the song to be continued?
Genius might answer the question; to Clarinda there came only the notion of a valuable contrast to be established between love and friendship, and a tribute to be paid to the kindly offices of the latter.The verses wherein she gave effect to this idea make a poor sequel; friendship, when it is personified and set beside the tyrant god, wears very much the air of a benevolent county magistrate, whose chief duty is to keep the peace.
Figures of this sort are in no sense removable decorations, they are at one with the substance of the thought to be expressed, and are entitled to the large control they claim.Imagination, working at white heat, can fairly subdue the matter of the poem to them, or fuse them with others of the like temper, striking unity out of the composite mass.One thing only is forbidden, to treat these substantial and living metaphors as if they were elegant curiosities, ornamental excrescences, to be passed over abruptly on the way to more exacting topics.The mystics, and the mystical poets, knew better than to countenance this frivolity.Recognising that there is a profound and intimate correspondence between all physical manifestations and the life of the soul, they flung the reins on the neck of metaphor in the hope that it might carry them over that mysterious frontier.Their failures and misadventures, familiarly despised as "conceits," left them floundering in absurdity.Yet not since the time of Donne and Crashaw has the full power and significance of figurative language been realised in English poetry.These poets, like some of their late descendants, were tortured by a sense of hidden meaning, and were often content with analogies that admit of no rigorous explanation.They were convinced that all intellectual truth is a parable, though its inner meaning be dark or dubious.The philosophy of friendship deals with those mathematical and physical conceptions of distance, likeness, and attraction - what if the law of bodies govern souls also, and the geometer's compasses measure more than it has entered into his heart to conceive? Is the moon a name only for a certain tonnage of dead matter, and is the law of passion parochial while the law of gravitation is universal? Mysticism will observe no such partial boundaries.
O more than Moon!
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere, Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear To teach the sea what it may do too soon.
The secret of these sublime intuitions, undivined by many of the greatest poets, has been left to the keeping of transcendental religion and the Catholic Church.
