Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/109

Rh be as a vacuum, so to be filled by the universe. Then the universe will fill me, and pour out again." Which dark saying I interpret here as an emblem of the receptivity of the artist to life at large. This it is his function to give out again, illumined, but unadulterate. The story is told, the song chanted, the drama constructed, with the simplest of understandings between audience and maker: as between children at their play, artisans at their handicraft, recounter and hearers around the desert fire. Every literature has more or less of this free, absolute poetry. But only in the drama, and at Early and late creative eras. distinctively imaginative periods, have poets of the Christian era been quite objective; not even there and then, without in most cases having "unlocked" their hearts by expression of personal feeling. This process—exemplified in the sonnets of Shakespeare, and in the minor works of Dante, Tasso, Cervantes, Calderon, Camoëns—rarely suggested itself to the antique poets, whose verses were composed for the immediate verdict of audiences great or small, and in the Attic period distinctly as works of art, necessarily universal, and not introspective. Nor would much self-intrusion then have been tolerated. Imagine the Homeric laughter of an Athenian conclave, every man of them with something of Aristophanes in him, at being summoned to listen to the sonnetary sorrows of a blighted lover! There were few Werthers in those days. Bad poets, and bores of all sorts, were