第54章
Then a fit of despondency comes over him.- I feel ashamed, sometimes, - said he, the other day, - to think how far my worst songs fall below my best.It sometimes seems to me, as I know it does to others who have told me so, that they ought to be ALL BEST, - if not in actual execution, at least in plan and motive.I am grateful - he continued - for all such criticisms.A man is always pleased to have his most serious efforts praised, and the highest aspect of his nature get the most sunshine.
Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, many minds must change their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or losing their voices.You know, I suppose, - he said, - what is meant by complementary colors? You know the effect, too, which the prolonged impression of any one color has on the retina.If you close your eyes after looking steadily at a RED object, you see a GREEN image.
It is so with many minds, - I will not say with all.After looking at one aspect of external nature, or of any form of beauty or truth, when they turn away, the COMPLEMENTARY aspect of the same object stamps itself irresistibly and automatically upon the mind.
Shall they give expression to this secondary mental state, or not?
When I contemplate - said my friend, the Poet - the infinite largeness of comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence, how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest condition, - never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves.After the first and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their holiday, and the cotton velvet and the thin-skinned jewelry -simple adornments, but befitting the station of those who wear them - show themselves to the crowd, who think them beautiful, as they ought to, though the people up stairs know that they are cheap and perishable?
- I don't know that I may not bring the Poet here, some day or other, and let him speak for himself.Still I think I can tell you what he says quite as well as he could do it.- Oh, - he said to me, one day, - I am but a hand-organ man, - say rather, a hand-organ.Life turns the winch, and fancy or accident pulls out the stops.I come under your windows, some fine spring morning, and play you one of my ADAGIO movements, and some of you say, - This is good, - play us so always.But, dear friends, if I did not change the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust in another.How easily this or that tune flows! - you say, - there must be no end of just such melodies in him.- I will open the poor machine for you one moment, and you shall look.- Ah! Every note marks where a spur of steel has been driven in.It is easy to grind out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make it was the painful task of time.
I don't like to say it, - he continued, - but poets commonly have no larger stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them piping up under your window, you know pretty well what to expect.
The more stops, the better.Do let them all be pulled out in their turn!
So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest songs, and after it a gay CHANSON, and then a string of epigrams.
All true, - he said, - all flowers of his soul; only one with the corolla spread, and another with its disk half opened, and the third with the heart-leaves covered up and only a petal or two showing its tip through the calyx.The water-lily is the type of the poet's soul, - he told me.
- What do you think, Sir, - said the divinity-student, - opens the souls of poets most fully?
Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus.
Neither is enough by itself.A rose will not flower in the dark, and a fern will not flower anywhere.
What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet's corolla?
- I don't like to say.They spoil a good many, I am afraid; or at least they shine on a good many that never come to anything.
Who are THEY? - said the schoolmistress.
Women.Their love first inspires the poet, and their praise is his best reward.
The schoolmistress reddened a little, but looked pleased.- Did Ireally think so? - I do think so; I never feel safe until I have pleased them; I don't think they are the first to see one's defects, but they are the first to catch the color and fragrance of a true poem.Fit the same intellect to a man and it is a bow-string, - to a woman and it is a harp-string.She is vibratile and resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter musical tremblings of the air about her.- Ah, me! - said my friend, the Poet, to me, the other day, - what color would it not have given to my thoughts, and what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on women's praises! I should have grown like Marvell's fawn, -"Lilies without; roses within!"
But then, - he added, - we all think, IF so and so, we should have been this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those rhymes of yours.
- I don't think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but of those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in soft and melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and sorrows, every literature is full.Nature carves with her own hands the brain which holds the creative imagination, but she casts the over-sensitive creatures in scores from the same mould.
There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of blondes.[Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table.-Please to tell us about those blondes, said the schoolmistress.]