FullReads

Where is the prime of Summer–the green prime–
The many, many leaves all twinkling?–Three
On the moss’d elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree!

(As a matter of fact, oak leaves are singularly tenacious, and the autumnal oak will show a thousand for the elm’s one. Hood, being a Cockney, took his seven leaves at random. But what does it matter? He was a poet, and seven leaves sufficed him to convey the idea.)

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Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home some hieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is an interpreter, and the interpreter’s success depends upon hitting his hearer’s intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null. To put it in another way–at the base of all Literature, of all Poetry, as of all Theology, stands one rock: the very highest Universe Truth is something so absolutely simple that a child can understand it. This is what Emerson means when he tells us that the great writers never seem to condescend; that yonder slip of a boy who has carried off Shakespeare to the window-seat, can feel with King Harry or Hamlet or Coriolanus, with Rosalind or Desdemona or Miranda. For the moment he is any given one of these, because any human soul contains them all. And some such thought we must believe to have been in Our Lord’s mind when He said, “I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” For as the Universe is one, so the individual human souls that apprehend it have no varying values intrinsically, but one equal value. They differ only in power to apprehend, and this may be more easily hindered than helped by the conceit begotten of finite knowledge. I would even dare to quote of this Universal Truth the words I once hardily put into the mouth of John Wesley concerning divine Love: “I see now that if God’s love reaches up to every star and down to every poor soul on Earth, it must be something vastly simple, so simple that all dwellers on earth may be assured of it–as all who have eyes may be assured of the planet shining yonder at the end of the street–and so vast that all bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it without considering their deserts.” The message, then, which one Poet brings home, is no esoteric one: as Johnson said of Gray’s Elegy, “it abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” It exalts us through the best in us, by telling it, not as anything new or strange, but so as we recognise it.

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And here let us dwell a moment on Johnson’s phrase, “to which every bosom returns an echo”: for it recalls us to a point, which we noted indeed on p. 22, but have left (I fear) somewhat under-emphasised–the emotion that enters into poetical truth, which only by the help of emotion is apprehended; as through emotion it is conveyed, and to an emotional understanding in the hearer addresses its appeal. For the desire of man’s soul after the Universal, to be in harmony with it, is (as a matter of fact, and when all pulpit eloquence has been discounted) something more than a mere intellectual attraction: a [Greek: storghe] rather; a yearning felt in its veins to know its fatherhood. Saint Paul goes farther and assures us that “the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation,” so that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” “And not only they,” he goes on, “but ourselves also”: while the pagan poet has tears that reach the heart of the transitory show: Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt–“Tears are for Life, mortal things pierce the soul.”