Thanks are due to the editor of The Egoist, London, for permission toreprint The Ghosts of an Old House and the Orange Symphony; to theeditor of Poetry, Chicago, for permission to reprint the Blue Symphony;and to the editor of The Little Review for permission to reprint theGreen Symphony.
The second half of the nineteenth and the first fifteen years of thetwentieth century have been a period of research, of experiment, ofunrest and questioning. In science and philosophy we have witnessed anattempt to destroy the mechanistic theory of the universe as developedby 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 inessentialsand to disclose the underlying basis of pure form. In life, theprinciples of nationality, of racial culture, of individualism, ofsocial development, of Christian ethics, have been discussed, debated,and examined from top to bottom, until at last, in the early years ofthe twentieth century we find all Europe, from the leaders of thoughtdown to the lowest peasantry, engaged in a mutually destructive war ofwhich few can trace the beginnings and none can foresee the end. Thefundamental tenets of thought, art, life itself, have been shaken: andeither civilization is destined to some new birth, or mankind willrevert to the conditions of life, thought, and social intercourse thatprevailed in the Stone Age.
Like all men of my generation, I have not been able to resist thisirresistible upheaval of ideas and of forces: and, to the best of myability, I have tried to arrive at a clear understanding of thefundamentals of æsthetic form as they affect the art to which I havefelt myself instinctively akin, the art of poetry. That I havecompletely attained such an understanding, it would be idle for me topretend: but I believe, and have induced some others to believe, that Ihave made a few steps towards it. Some explanation of my own peculiartheories and beliefs is necessary, however, to those who have notspecifically concerned themselves with poetry, or who suffer in thepresence of any new work of art from the normal human reaction that allart principles are so essentially fixed that any departure from acceptedideas is madness.
The fundamental basis of all the arts is the same. In every case artaims at the evocation of some human emotion in the spectator orlistener. Where science proceeds from effects to causes, and seeks toanalyze the underlying causes of emotion and sensation, art reverses theprocess, and constructs something that will awaken emotions, accordingto the amount of receptiveness with which other people approach it. Thusarchitecture gives us feelings of density, proportion, harmony:sculpture, of masses in movement; painting, of colour-harmony and theordered composition of lines and volumes from which arise sensations ofspace: music, of the development of sounds into melodic line, harmonicprogression, tonal opposition, and symphonic structure.
The object of literature is not dissimilar from these. Literature aimsat releasing the emotions that arise from the formed words of a certainlanguage. But literature is probably a less pure—and hence moreuniversal—art than any I have yet examined. For it must be apparent toall minds that not only is a word a definite symbol of some fact, butalso it is a thing capable of being spoken or sounded