



Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
(From images generously made available by the Internet
Archive.)





GOBLINS AND PAGODAS

BY

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER



BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1916





TO

DAISY



Thanks are due to the editor of The Egoist, London, for permission to
reprint The Ghosts of an Old House and the Orange Symphony; to the
editor of Poetry, Chicago, for permission to reprint the Blue Symphony;
and to the editor of The Little Review for permission to reprint the
Green Symphony.




PREFACE


I

The second half of the nineteenth and the first fifteen years of the
twentieth century have been a period of research, of experiment, of
unrest and questioning. In science and philosophy we have witnessed an
attempt to destroy the mechanistic theory of the universe as developed
by Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The unknowable has been questioned:
hypotheses have been shaken: vitalism and idealism have been proclaimed.
In the arts, the tendency has been to strip each art of its inessentials
and to disclose the underlying basis of pure form. In life, the
principles of nationality, of racial culture, of individualism, of
social development, of Christian ethics, have been discussed, debated,
and examined from top to bottom, until at last, in the early years of
the twentieth century we find all Europe, from the leaders of thought
down to the lowest peasantry, engaged in a mutually destructive war of
which few can trace the beginnings and none can foresee the end. The
fundamental tenets of thought, art, life itself, have been shaken: and
either civilization is destined to some new birth, or mankind will
revert to the conditions of life, thought, and social intercourse that
prevailed in the Stone Age.

Like all men of my generation, I have not been able to resist this
irresistible upheaval of ideas and of forces: and, to the best of my
ability, I have tried to arrive at a clear understanding of the
fundamentals of aesthetic form as they affect the art to which I have
felt myself instinctively akin, the art of poetry. That I have
completely attained such an understanding, it would be idle for me to
pretend: but I believe, and have induced some others to believe, that I
have made a few steps towards it. Some explanation of my own peculiar
theories and beliefs is necessary, however, to those who have not
specifically concerned themselves with poetry, or who suffer in the
presence of any new work of art from the normal human reaction that all
art principles are so essentially fixed that any departure from accepted
ideas is madness.


II

The fundamental basis of all the arts is the same. In every case art
aims at the evocation of some human emotion in the spectator or
listener. Where science proceeds from effects to causes, and seeks to
analyze the underlying causes of emotion and sensation, art reverses the
process, and constructs something that will awaken emotions, according
to the amount of receptiveness with which other people approach it. Thus
architecture gives us feelings of density, proportion, harmony:
sculpture, of masses in movement; painting, of colour-harmony and the
ordered composition of lines and volumes from which arise sensations of
space: music, of the development of sounds into melodic line, harmonic
progression, tonal opposition, and symphonic structure.

The object of literature is not dissimilar from these. Literature aims
at releasing the emotions that arise from the formed words of a certain
language. But literature is probably a less pure--and hence more
universal--art than any I have yet examined. For it must be apparent to
all minds that not only is a word a definite symbol of some fact, but
also it is a thing capable of being spoken or sounded. The art of
literature, then, in so far as it deals with definite statements, is
akin to painting or photography: in so far as it deals with sounded
words, it is akin to music.


III

Literature, therefore, does not depend on the peculiar twists and quirks
which represent, to those who can read, the words, but rather on the
essential words themselves. In fact, literature existed before writing;
and writing in itself is of no value from the purely literary sense,
except in so far as it preserves and transmits from generation to
generation the literary emotion. Style, whether in prose or poetry, is
an attempt to develop this essentially musical quality of literature, to
evoke the magic that exists in the sound-quality of words, as well as
to combine these sound-qualities in definite statements or sentences.
The difference between prose and poetry is, therefore, not a difference
of means, but of psychological effect and reaction. The means employed,
the formed language, is the same: but the resultant impression is quite
different.

In prose, the emotions expressed are those that are capable of
development in a straight line. In so far as prose is pure, it confines
itself to the direct orderly progression of a thought or conception or
situation from point to point of a flat surface. The sentences, as they
develop this conception from its beginning to conclusion, move on, and
do not return upon themselves. The grouping of these sentences into
paragraphs gives the breadth of the thought. The paragraphs, sections,
and chapters are each a square, in that they represent a division of the
main thought into parallel units, or blocks of subsidiary ideas. The
sensation of depth is finally obtained by arranging these blocks in a
rising climacteric progression, or in parallel lines, or in a sort of
zigzag figure.

The psychological reaction that arises from the intelligent appreciation
of poetry is quite different. In poetry, we have a succession of curves.
The direction of the thought is not in straight lines, but wavy and
spiral. It rises and falls on gusts of strong emotion. Most often it
creates strongly marked loops and circles. The structure of the stanza
or strophe always tends to the spherical. Depth is obtained by making
one sphere contain a number of concentric, or overlapping spheres.

Hence, when we speak of poetry we usually mean regular rhyme and metre,
which have for so long been considered essential to all poetry, not as a
device for heightening musical