The Poet's Poet Part 29

When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman's work, You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land.

There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the Turk, And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword in his hand.

It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the wars and died, And Sir Philip Sidney's lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was strong, And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride, Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song.

[Footnote: Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet_.]

It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet lasting. And it cannot be justly charged that the draft carried the poet, along with the street-loafer, into the fray, an unwilling victim.

From Aeschylus and David to Byron and the recent war poets, the singer may find plenty of names to substantiate his claim that he glories in war as his natural element. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet as a warrior see Thomas Moore, _The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard, The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent, Dear Harp of My Country_; Praed, _The Eve of Battle_; Whitman, _Song of the Banner at Daybreak_; E. C. Stedman, _Jean Prouvaire's Song at the Barricade, Byron_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante, A Song of Life_; S. K. Wiley, _Dante and Beatrice_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_; Richard Realf, _Vates, Written on the Night of His Suicide_; Cale Young Rice, _David, Aeschylus_; Swinburne, _The Sisters_; G. E. Woodberry, _Requiem_; Rupert Brooke, _1914_; Joyce Kilmer, _In Memory of Rupert Brooke, The Proud Poet_; Alan Seeger, _I Have a Rendez-vous with Death, Sonnet to Sidney, Liebestod_; John Bunker, _On Bidding Farewell to a Poet Gone to the Wars_; Jessie Rittenhouse, _To Poets Who Shall Fall in Battle_; Rossiter Johnson, _A Soldier Poet_; Herbert Kaufman, _h.e.l.l Gate of Soissons_; Herbert Asquith, _The Volunteer_; Julian Grenfil, _Into Battle_; Grace Hazard Conkling, _Francis Ledwidge_; Richard Mansfield, 2d, _Song of the Artists_; Norreys Jephson O'Connor, _In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge_; Donald F. Goold Johnson, _Rupert Brooke_.] A recent writer has said, "The poet must ever go where the greatest songs are singing," [Footnote: See Christopher Morley, Essay on Joyce Kilmer.] and nowhere is the poetry of life so manifest as where life is in constant hazard. The verse of Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger surely makes it plain that warfare was the spark which touched off their genius, even as it might have done Byron's,

When the true lightning of his soul was bared, Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch.

[Footnote: Stephen Phillips, _Emily Bronte_.]

But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his character of soldier, or how efficient as a man of affairs, this does not settle his quarrel with the utilitarians, for they are not to be pacified by a recital of the poet's avocations. They would remind him that the world claims the whole of his time. If, after a day of strenuous activity, he hurries home with the pleasant conviction that he has earned a long evening in which to woo the Muse, the world is too likely to peer through the shutters and exclaim, "What? Not in bed yet?

Then come out and do some extra ch.o.r.es." If the poet is to prove his t.i.tle as an efficient citizen, it is clear that he must reveal some merit in verse-making itself. If he can make no more ambitious claims for himself, he must, at the very least, show that Browning was not at fault when he excused his occupation:

I said, to do little is bad; to do nothing is worse, And wrote verse.

[Footnote: Ferishtah's Fancies.]

How can the poet satisfy the philistine world that his songs are worth while? Need we ask? Business men will vouch for their utility, if he will but conform to business men's ideas of art. Here is a typical expression of their views, couched in verse for the singer's better comprehension:

The days of long-haired poets now are o'er, The short-haired poet seems to have the floor; For now the world no more attends to rhymes That do not catch the spirit of the times.

The short-haired poet has no muse or chief, He sings of corn. He eulogizes beef.

[Footnote: "The Short-haired Poet," in _Common-Sense_, by E. F. Ware.]

But the poet utterly repudiates such a view of himself as this, for he cannot draw his breath in the commercial world. [Footnote: Several poems lately have voiced the poet's horror of materialism. See Josephine Preston Peabody, _The Singing Man_; Richard Le Gallienne, _To R. W.

Emerson, Richard Watson Gilder_; Mary Robinson, _Art and Life_.] In vain he a.s.sures his would-be friends that the intangibilities with which he deals have a value of their own. Emerson says,

One harvest from thy field Homeward brought the oxen strong; A second crop thine acres yield Which I gather in a song.

[Footnote: _Apology_]

But for this second crop the practical man says he can find absolutely no market; hence overtures of friendliness between him and the poet end with sneers and contempt on both sides. Doubtless the best way for the poet to deal with the perennial complaints of the practical-minded, is simply to state brazenly, as did Oscar Wilde, "All art is quite useless." [Footnote: Preface to _Dorian Gray_.]

Is the poet justified, then, in stopping his ears to all censure, and living unto himself? Not so; when the hub-bub of his sordid accusers dies away, he is conscious of another summons, before a tribunal which he cannot despise or ignore. For once more the poet's equivocal position exposes him to attacks from all quarters. He stands midway between the spiritual and the physical worlds, he reveals the ideal in the sensual.

Therefore, while the practical man complains that the poet does not handle the solid objects of the physical world, but trans.m.u.tes them to airy nothings, the philosopher, on the contrary, condemns the poet because he does not wholly sever connections with this same physical world, but is continually hovering about it, like a homesick ghost.

Like the plain man, the philosopher gives the poet a chance to vindicate his usefulness. Plato's challenge is not so age-worn that we may not requote it. He makes Socrates say, in the _Republic_,

Let us a.s.sure our sweet friend (poetry) and the sister arts of imitation that if she will only prove her t.i.tle to exist in a well-ordered state, we shall be delighted to receive her.... We are very conscious of her charms, but we may not on that account betray the truth.... Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but on this condition only, that she makes a defense of herself in lyrical or some other meter? And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf. Let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to states and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit.

[Footnote: _Republic_, Book X, 607.]

One wonders why the lovers of Poetry have been so much more solicitous for her cause than Poetry herself has appeared to be. Aristotle, and after him many others,--in the field of English literature, Sidney, Sh.e.l.ley, and in our own day G. E. Woodberry,--have made most eloquent defenses in prose, but thus far the supreme lyrical defense has not been forthcoming. Perhaps Poetry feels that it is beneath her dignity to attempt a utilitarian justification for herself. Yet in the verse of the last century and a half there are occasional pa.s.sages which give the impression that Poetry, with childishly averted head, is offering them to us, as if to say, "Don't think I would stoop to defend myself, but here are some things I might say for myself, if I wished."

Since the Platonic philosopher and the practical man stand for antipodal conceptions of reality, it really seems too bad that Plato will not give the poet credit for a little merit, in comparison with his arch-enemy.

But as a matter of fact, the spectator of eternity and the sense-blinded man of the street form a grotesque fraternity, for the nonce, and the philosopher a.s.sures the plain man that he is far more to his liking than is the poet. Plato's reasoning is, of course, that the plain man at least does not tamper with the objects of sense, through which the philosopher may discern gleams of the spiritual world, whereas the poet distorts them till their real significance is obscured. The poet pretends that he is giving their real meaning, even as the philosopher, but his interpretation is false. He is like a man who, by an ingenious system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body.

Will not Plato's accusation of the poet's inferiority to the practical man be made clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble ill.u.s.tration of the three beds? One, he says, is made by G.o.d, one by the carpenter, and one by the poet. [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, 596 B ff.] Now the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well known. It speaks, in "ponderous ba.s.s," to the other furniture in the room:

"I know what is and what has been; Not anything to me comes strange, Who in so many years have seen And lived through every kind of change.

I know when men are bad or good, When well or ill," he slowly said, "When sad or glad, when sane or mad And when they sleep alive or dead."

[Footnote: _In the Room_]

Plato would say of this majestic four-poster, with its multifarious memories "of births and deaths and marriage nights," that it does not come so near the essential idea of bedness as does the most non-descript product of the carpenters' tools. James Thomson's poem, he would say, is on precisely the same plane as the reflection of one's bed in the mirror across the room. Therefore he inquires, "Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing higher in him? ... Imitation is only a kind of play or sport."

[Footnote: _Republic_ X, 599 A.]

It has long been the fas.h.i.+on for those who care for poetry to shake their heads over Plato's aberration at this point. It seems absurd enough to us to hear the utility of a thing determined by its number of dimensions. What virtue is there in merely filling s.p.a.ce? We all feel the fallacy in such an adaptation of Plato's argument as Longfellow a.s.signs to Michael Angelo, causing that versatile artist to conclude:

Painting and sculpture are but images; Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, As something in itself, and not an image, A something that is not, surpa.s.ses them As substance shadow.

[Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.]

Yet it may be that the homeliness of Plato's ill.u.s.tration has misled us as to the seriousness of the problem. Let us forget about beds and buildings and think of actual life in the more dignified way that has become habitual to us since the war. Then it must appear that Plato's charge is as truly a live issue here and now as it ever was in Athens.

The claims for the supremacy of poetry, set forth by Aristotle, Sidney and the rest, seem to weaken, for the time being, at least, when we find that in our day the judgment that poetry is inferior to life comes, not from outsiders, but from men who were at one time most ardent votaries of the muse. Repudiation by verse-writers of poetry's highest claims we have been accustomed to dismiss, until recently, as betrayal of a streak of commonness in the speaker's nature,--of a disposition to value the clay of life more highly than the fire. We were not, perhaps, inclined to take even so great a poet as Byron very seriously when he declared, "I by no means rank poets or poetry high in the scale of the intellect.

It is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake. I prefer the talents of action." But with the outbreak of the world war one met unquestionably sincere confession from more than one poet that he found verse-writing a pale and anemic thing. Thus "A.

E." regretted the time that he spent on poetry, sighing,

He who might have wrought in flame Only traced upon the foam.

[Footnote: _Epilogue_]

In the same spirit are Joyce Kilmer's words, written shortly before his death in the trenches: "I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory." [Footnote: Letter, May 7, 1918. See Joyce Kilmer's works, edited by Richard Le Gallienne.] Also we have the decision of Francis Ledwidge, another poet who died a soldier:

A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart, Are greater than a poet's art, And greater than a poet's fame A little grave that has no name.

[Footnote: _Soliloquy_.]

Is not our idealization of poets who died in war a confession that we ourselves believe that they chose the better part,--that they did well to discard imitation of life for life itself?

It is not fair to force an answer to such a question till we have more thoroughly canva.s.sed poets' convictions on this matter. Do they all admit the justice of Plato's characterization of poetry as a sport, comparable to golf or tennis? In a few specific instances, poets have taken this att.i.tude toward their own verse, of course. There was the "art for art's sake" cry, which at the end of the last century surely degenerated into such a conception of poetry. There have been a number of poets like Austin Dobson and Andrew Lang, who have frankly regarded their verse as a pastime to while away an idle hour. There was Swinburne, who characterized many of his poems as being idle and light as white b.u.t.terflies. [Footnote: See the _Dedication to Christina Rossetti_, and _Envoi_.] But when we turn away from these prestidigitators of rhymes and rhythms, we find that no view of poetry is less acceptable than this one to poets in general. They are far more likely to earn the world's ridicule by the deadly seriousness with which they take verse writing. If the object of his pursuit is a sport, the average poet is as little aware of it as is the athlete who suffers a nervous collapse before the big game of the season.

But Plato's more significant statement is untouched. Is poetry an imitation of life? It depends, of course, upon how broadly we interpret the phrase, "imitation of life." In one sense almost every poet would say that Plato was right in characterizing poetry thus. The usual account of inspiration points to pa.s.sive mirroring of life. Someone has said of the poet,

As a lake Reflects the flower, tree, rock, and bending heaven, Shall he reflect our great humanity.

[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.]

And these lines are not false to the general view of the poet's function, but they leave us leeway to quarrel over the nature of the reflection mentioned, just as we quarrel over the exact connotations of Plato's and Aristotle's word, imitation. Even if we hold to the narrower meaning of imitation, there are a few poets who intimate that imitation alone is their aim in writing poetry. Denying that life has an ideal element, they take pains to mirror it, line for line, and blemish for blemish. How can they meet Plato's question as to their usefulness? If life is a hideous, meaningless thing, as they insinuate, it is not clear what merit can abide in a faithful reflection of it. Let us take the case of Robert Service, who prided himself upon the realism of his war poetry. [Footnote: See _Rhymes of a Red Cross Man_.] Perhaps his defense depends, more truly than he realized, upon the implication contained in his two lines,

If there's good in war and crime, There may be in my bits of rhyme.

[Footnote: See _Ibid_.]

Yet the realist may find a sort of justification for himself; at least James Thomson, B.V., thinks he has found one for him. The most thoroughly hopeless exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in English poetry, is doubtless Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_.

Why does the author give such a ghastly thing to the world? In order, he says, that some other clear-eyed spectator of the nightmare of existence may gain a forlorn comfort from it, since he will know that a comrade before him has likewise seen things at their blackest and worst. But would Plato accept this as a justification for realistic poetry? It is doubtful. No one could be comforted by a merely literal rendering of life. The comfort must derive from the personal equation, which is the despair engendered in the author by dreams of something better than reality; therefore whatever merit resides in such poetry comes not from its realism, but from the idealism of the writer.

We must not think that all poets who regard their poetry as a reflection of this world alone, agree in praising glaring realism as a virtue.

Rather, some of them say, the value of their reflection lies in its misty indistinctness. Life may be sordid and ugly at first hand, but let the artist's reflection only be remote enough, and the jagged edges and dissonances of color which mar daily living will be lost in the purple haze of distance. Gazing at such a reflection, men may perhaps forget, for a s.p.a.ce, how dreary a thing existence really is.

And they shall be accounted poet-kings Who simply tell the most heart-easing things, [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.]

said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose inevitably calls up William Morris:

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale, not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

[Footnote: _Prologue to the Earthly Paradise_.]