The Literature of Ecstasy Part 11

Poetry will tend to become international, and instead of seeking to encourage national prejudices, will seek to eradicate them. Race prejudice is one of the deepest rooted prejudices which inferior poets often encourage. The old idea that the man of another country is a barbarian and that the alien is an enemy within our gates, a tolerated, unwelcome guest, must be eradicated. Can any one contemplate without disgust plays and photoplays that depict Chinese, j.a.panese, Negroes and Jews as criminals, simply because of their creed or color? Is it true that virtue resides in the breast of the Aryan race only? The eighteenth century idea of the brotherhood of man is not extinct and the future will use poetry to spread this idea. Poetry should not foster hatred of people because they are followers of different customs.

It can hardly be doubted that the poetry of the future will deal more with the emotions as experienced by the proletariat cla.s.s. The feelings to which many of our greatest poets have given vent in recent years have been those of the middle and capitalistic cla.s.s, just as bards in the past voiced the emotions of the feudalist lords, and religious and military leaders. The connection between economics and literature or poetry is not as remote as it seems. Bernard Shaw has made use of his knowledge of the subject in constructing his plays. The work of Gorki, Hauptmann and Zola has taken into consideration the feelings that the average working people go through in their struggle for existence. Yet the works of these writers are art or poetry, and not tracts. Literature written to encourage the working men in their abject and ill-paid condition will not be countenanced by the future. The songs of the poet with lily white hands who writes about the dignity of toil and subservience to the employer will disappear. The emotions connected with the struggle for a living and with a desire for a more equitable distribution of wealth, will be the subject of our poetry.

Much of the old poetry should be discouraged for it is debased and undemocratic. Take the themes of the epics of India, Persia, Ireland, England, Greece, Finland, Rome, Italy, Spain, Germany and Iceland, all of which are lauded as among the greatest literary productions of the world. Wars are the subjects, fighters are the heroes. The l.u.s.t for fighting is encouraged instead of being decried. While all of these epics contain beautiful pa.s.sages and poems of glowing and even unsurpa.s.sed beauty, they keep man back in the primitive stage, and countenance a state of barbarism that he should outgrow.

It may after all be fortunate that the earliest poetry of nations is seldom read, for most of it is of very little intellectual value, celebrating the wars and religions of the writers. Occasionally there are secular poems of modern and universal interest among them. But for the most part, fighting absorbs the writers and all their interests are in bloodshed, revenge, cruelty. There are many causes fostering the hatreds and errors of our day, without our using these old works to spread them. We find there silly codes of honor, idiotic conceptions of justice, amazing viewpoints of morality. We want the emotions celebrated in these old works to die out and not to be perpetuated.

The world of democracy belongs to poetry, not merely the democracy of the realistic novel which was willing to concede that even the poor man like the old kings and the n.o.bility had love tragedies. Poetry will deal not with that philanthropy, which often means the master throwing crumbs to quiet the growling servant. No, it will be based on feelings that emanate from a sincere desire to promote human justice. There is no doubt that some day our system of society which permits a man to roll up billions which he squanders, while it does not allow another enough to keep himself and his family in comfort, will disappear, and poetry will express the emotions prevalent under the new order.

Much of the poetry of the past has sung the praises of wage slavery. The poetry of the future will sing as Amos did of old the beauty of social and economic equality. To-day the hero of the poem is the successful business man, or the submissive contented working man, just as in the past the soldier and the monk were the heroes. To-morrow it will be the man who fights for economic justice for himself or the ma.s.ses. Our standards of economic justice are changing and this change will effect poetry. The poet who sings in defense of the capitalist or our economic system has little in common with him who is the spokesman of the common people.

Poetry springs from the people and must take into consideration their emotions in connection with their economic problems. Very little of the poetry of the past has done this. Consider the literature of the middle ages and note how seldom the troubles of the serfs and villains were expressed by the poets. There were slight efforts made in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in the _Romance of the Rose_ and in Langland's _Piers Plowman_, respectively, to give some expression to the feelings of the ma.s.ses.

Modern poetry tends to deal emotionally with social problems. The poet who calls attention to the suffering of the poor, or the persecutions of reformers, or shows the ills in family life brought about by our marriage system, or announces a social message, is not a propagandist when he writes something that evokes our emotions. When Untermeyer published his book on poetry he was much criticized for the prominence he gave to James Oppenheim and Arthur Giovanitti, who are excellent poets. It is to be regretted that Untermeyer did not include also a chapter on Horace Traubel. Untermeyer may insist too much on the social mission of poetry, but he is nearer to an exalted conception of poetry than those who weld words to metre and have neither ideas nor substance in their writing.

Emerson said, "There is no subject that does not belong to him (the poet),--politics, economics, manufactures and stock brokerage; as much as sunsets and souls; only these things, placed in their order, are poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic."

An English clergyman, F. W. Robertson, in his two lectures on the "Influence of Poetry on the Working Cla.s.ses," delivered in 1852, and posthumously collected in _Lectures and Essays_, gave vent to many remarkable ideas on the subject of poetry. The following pa.s.sage was written three years before the _Leaves of Gra.s.s_, and sums up Whitman's ideas, and is worthy of quotation to-day for its timeliness:

The Poetry of the coming age must come from the Working Cla.s.ses. In the upper ranks, Poetry, so far at least as it represents their life, has long been worn out, sickly and sentimental. Its manhood is effete. Feudal aristocracy with its a.s.sociations, the castle and the tournament, has pa.s.sed away. Its last healthy tones came from the harp of Scott.

Byron sang its funeral dirge. But tenderness, and heroism, and endurance still want their voice, and it must come from the cla.s.ses whose observation is at first hand, and who speak fresh from nature's heart. What has poetry to do with our Working Cla.s.ses? Men of work! We want our poetry from you--from men who will dare to live a brave and true life;----

It does not follow that individualism in poetry will die out and that ignorant laborers are to be the sole heroes and subjects of poetry. The intellectual reader will still find in poetry his intellectual heroes.

There will never be equality of intellect, and hence there will also be something of an intellectual aristocracy in connection with the literature and poetry of democracy.

The note of ecstasy as a pa.s.sion for righteousness and social justice is of a high order usually. It was this note in which Greek and Roman poetry, however, was deficient. It is this ecstasy that raises the prophetic portions of the Bible to the high plane they occupy.

Professor Butcher, surely one in sympathy with Greek art, pointed out the weakness of Greek criticism, in that it failed to consider the social state in connection with the work of art. This state of criticism was due to the fact that the poetry of the Greeks showed no deep interest in social justice. Pindar, the greatest lyricist of the Greeks, wrote about athletic contests; athletes were his heroes. The Greeks glorified healthy bodies in their poetry, an exalted feature undoubtedly. Homer wrote about wars, and Achilles remained the type of Greek hero. aeschylus dwelt on the laws of divine retribution for indulgence in crime. Sophocles contemplated the irony of fate. Sappho recorded her love troubles.

The only exception of a work treating of poetry in connection with social justice is Plato's _Republic_, and he concluded that the poet was unnecessary. Yet he himself is one of the few Greek poets who showed deep interest in social justice.

The first critic who pointed out the connection between poetry and social conditions was the author of _On the Sublime_, who ends his treatise with a beautiful attack on the love of money which hinders the development of good art. This is the first pa.s.sage in pagan antiquity to point out the evils of commercialism in connection with art.

None of the Greek poets (except perhaps Aristophanes) thought it worthy of their art to cry out against the social abuses of the time, and to lament the existence of wrong. The Roman satires alone in pagan literature approached, though weakly, the ecstasy for social justice in the prophecies of the Bible. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah rank higher than most of the Greek poems because they show a social consciousness steeped in emotion. Pa.s.sages like these are Hebraic and not Greek. "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth." _Isaiah_ (Ch. 5, v. 8). "They are waxen fat, they s.h.i.+ne: yea, they overpa.s.s the deeds of the wicked: they judge not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge." _Jeremiah_ (Ch. 5, v. 28). "Take away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.

But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." _Amos_ (Ch. 5, v. 23-24).

Fenelon in a famous pa.s.sage eloquently proclaimed the superiority of Hebrew poetry to Greek poetry. Heine, a p.r.o.nounced h.e.l.lenist, came to the final conclusion that the Greeks were children and the Hebrews men.

The Hebrew idea of righteousness was a different one from the later Christian notion of consciousness of sin. The latter was really a perversion of the former, and ended rather in social injustices as the history of the medieval ages shows.

The discussion in regard to the merits of poetry with a mission, or poetry that is purely aesthetic, was revived on the occasion of the publication of Untermeyer's book _The New Era in American Poetry_. His critics made the mistake of thinking that those who want poetry to deal with social ideas are not ready to recognize poems that are beautiful, or convey an emotion, even if there is little intellectual content behind the work. There is no social message in Poe's _Raven_, for example, but I could not imagine Untermeyer not being moved by that poem, for it digs down into the emotions; it was written out of Poe's tragic life and finds a response in us all. Untermeyer has not been tardy in his appreciation of poets without a message like Frost and Robinson. In fact Untermeyer ignores quite a number of Revolutionary poets.

The reader may say that a new social idea in poetry is just as bad as an old moral saw, in that they are both didactic. It all depends on the ecstatic presentation, but I think that an idea that is advanced and unrecognized is by virtue of its novelty and truth more capable of swaying the emotion that we call poetic than the repet.i.tion of a hackneyed ethical maxim which every child knows and hears usually without emotion. Ibsen's plays are poetry not only because of the treatment, but because of the ideas there, while many of the English eighteenth century moralists in verse are poets neither in treatment nor ideas.

The only country where critics have had almost no use for the theory of art for art's sake has been Russia. Here they have also had no such compromising views that seek to know only whether the poet has done his work well, and whether he has delivered his message irrespective of its value, importance or truth. The Russian critics were men who were interested in the connection between life and poetry, and never failed to have their eye on the former while considering the latter. They did more, they had their eye on the future, and hence were usually liberal.

We know very little about these Russian critics, and only recently has the nature of their work been outlined by Thomas G. Masaryk, who before the war published _The Spirit of Russia_ just translated into English.

Previously Kropotkin and a few historians of Russian literature had touched on their work. Some day perhaps we may be so fortunate as to have translations into English of the works of Bielinski, Tchernishevski, Dobrolubov, Pisarev and Mihailovsky. To these men art was a serious thing, and they would not have its value lost in metaphysical theories of aesthetics about beauty, in endless discussions about the niceties and importance of metrical forms. Poetry dealt with social problems and suggested changes in society. Its mission was to deal with the unbared human soul and above all not to lie and affect.

Every one has conceived the function of poetry as being something different, usually as something to spread his own views. Thus the theologian looks upon it as a handmaid of religion, to show the beauty of a dogma and a peculiar view of life in accordance with his religion.

The voluptuary thinks it merely a means of arousing s.e.xual morality.

Some philosophers think it a vehicle to promulgate their own systems.

Thus Nietzsche believed poetry should spread the gospel of the will to power, while Schopenhauer thought it reached its highest point when it glorified the denial of the will to live.

The world can never be fully agreed as to what poetry is any more than it can agree as to what beauty, truth, or duty is. A pa.s.sage may appeal to one person and not to another. It all depends on the beliefs, tastes, experiences and education of the reader. Patriotic and religious poetry, whether in verse or prose, falls flat on the internationalist and free thinker respectively, because they do not adore the sentiments therein, though they might admit the beauty of the writing and recognize the appeal it makes to those who are in accord with the writer. They cannot be responsive to the soul of the singer because they are differently const.i.tuted in their beliefs and because the ideas that aroused in the poet one train of emotions, move them to a contrary pa.s.sion.

Let us take a hypothetical case. A man a few centuries ago was sentenced to be burned at the stake for his religious beliefs. A poet who approved of this course wrote a poem where his emotions are crystallized. He was sorry for the victim and hoped G.o.d would pardon him and make him see the error of his ways. He praised the executioner who himself was grieved that he had to take this course to save the infidel's soul. He was certain that G.o.d was pleased with the sentence.

He deplored the evil effects that might follow if this man were allowed to live to spread his infamous doctrines, he rebuked the man for the trouble he brought on his family. On the whole he gave us a metrical and emotional composition actually describing his sensations, not even omitting sympathetic reference to the sufferings of the victim. This was poetry to those thousands that day who approved of this act. But most of us cannot to-day enter into the ecstasy of the writer; it is not poetry to us. But while people to-day are not burned at the stake, they are persecuted for advancing ideas that are beyond the public. The poets, who are on a low level of thought with the public, in writing poems against such individuals or the ideas or cause represented by them, are not poets to those who support the persecuted individual or his ideas.

Most poets still write in defense of burning at the stake of great humanitarians, but they advocate other measures than burning by real fire.

When Ibsen said in reply to the critic who would not allow _Peer Gynt_ to be called poetry, that the definition of poetry would have to be changed to take in his poem, he was stating a condition that always takes place when a new poetic masterpiece appears. The conception as to what is poetry always changes, for what moves man in one age does not move him in another. The poets often have to do what Whitman and Wordsworth did, create the tastes by which they are to be enjoyed. We are all aware that in the eighteenth century poetry meant something entirely different from what we believe it to be to-day. Many men were considered poets then whom we do not regard as such. The same is true of poetry in prose. There was hostility to the poetry in the novels of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, because the public did not want to accept their artistic innovations, their frankness and their views.

Yeats in his essay "What is Popular Poetry" in the _Ideas of Good and Evil_, said that poetry of a very high order, like the _Epipsychidion_, is not popular for it presupposes more than it says. All good poetry, whether springing from a written or an unwritten tradition, is always "strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have not understanding," and suggests remembrance of impossible things, and glimmers with thoughts and images dating back to unknown history.

There is a great deal of literature or poetry which presupposes some culture, and a sensitiveness to beauty, and especially a highly developed intellect. The man with the commonplace mind, even though he be educated and well read, is often unable to appreciate the beauty of poetry in which new and advanced and unpopular ideas are held in solution. The poetry in the work of Whitman and Nietzsche and Ibsen was not felt by people who could not enter into the spirit of their revolt from contemporary morality. The public cannot appreciate the prose poetry of Hearn because of his rich language and aesthetic sensitiveness.

The public can take an interest in the beauty and poetry of ideas it understands, and written in language that it speaks and in images that it uses; but the poet is often at his best an aristocrat in thought and language, and then it takes a well trained individual reader to like him. Poetry is no longer mere folklore or ballads or musical numbers, all of which the public may enjoy.

There is no such thing as absolute truth. Truth is only a relative term.

When a man speaks of the truth he means those doctrines which he himself embraces. Every man believes that the views that he entertains are true, otherwise he would not hold them. Many people have in the past died for the "truth," when we know that they upheld falsehood.

A writer who is liberally inclined will hold liberal ideas to be the truth; a conservative regards only conservative views as true. An author who embraces ideas from both the conventional and radical spheres, considers only those books as true whose authors do the same thing.

In a sane essay on De Vigny, Mill makes a remarkable distinction between the conservative and radical poet, concluding that the greatest poet will always partake of the nature of both, mentioning as example Balzac and De Vigny. Had he written on the subject a half-century later he might have named Ibsen, whose _Brond_ and _Wild Duck_ are good conservative poems. Mill, who was no disciple of art for art's sake, said that the radical poet will paint pa.s.sionate love, "will show it at war with the forms and customs of society, nay even with its laws and religion, if the laws and tenets which regulate that branch of human relations are among those which have begun to be murmured against." "To him, whatever exists will appear from that alone fit to be represented: to probe the wounds of society and humanity is part of his business, and he will neither shrink from exhibiting what is in nature, because it is morally culpable, nor because it is physically revolting." Here Mill antic.i.p.ates Zola, Ibsen and Freud. No wonder that so radical a critic as Brandes was attracted to him. It is a pity he did not continue literary criticism.

It is probably vain to try to define different types of poetic or literary excellence, but we may state some of these. Formerly a first-cla.s.s poet was one who successfully imitated a model and followed certain rules. Or he was one who successfully voiced the current accepted views of the age. It is these reasons that still make many people consider Dante and Milton among the first-cla.s.s poets. Again there is a tendency to regard as poets of the first cla.s.s those who perfected their art technically. Hence aeschylus and Sophocles are ranked among the greatest poets. Sometimes he is regarded among the greatest poets because he is among the earliest, like Homer. The position of poets like Shakespeare, Moliere, Cervantes and Goethe as first-cla.s.s world poets and writers, cannot be contested, because they are so universal.

Under the influence of Ibsen, Shaw in his preface to a new edition of his novel _The Irrational Knot_ laid down an interesting distinction between literature of the first and of the second order. The distinction applies to poetry as well. Shaw considered as literature of the first order work which makes a distinct original contribution to morality, even if such writing is literary criticism. He regards the writers who accept ready-made morality as of the second order. Shaw admits that writers of the first order are often less readable and less constructive than writers of the second order. He mentions among writers of the first order, Ibsen, Euripides, Byron, Wilde and La Rochefoucauld, and Shakespeare in _Hamlet_. From prefaces in other books of his we know he would include men like Blake, Sh.e.l.ley, Nietzsche, and Butler. As writers of the second order he mentions Shakespeare, Scott, Dumas, d.i.c.kens, Ruskin, Carlyle, and he would no doubt include writers like Macaulay and Holmes. He does not mean that a writer of the first order is always greater than one of the second order, but he does insist as follows: "No man who shuts his eyes and opens his mouth when religion and morality are offered to him on a long spoon, can share the same Parna.s.sian bench with those who make an original contribution to religion and morality, were it only a criticism." In spite of the contention of the art for art's sake school that poetry has nothing to do with morality or religion, the greatest poets are those authors of the literature of ecstasy who championed new ideas, fought for liberty in their works, expressed the advanced ideas of the age, and gave us a new and more liberal outlook on life. While it is true that often poets of the second order have expressed strongly and movingly just the common sentiments of everybody, on the whole the original poets rank higher. It is this which puts Whitman above Longfellow, Nietzsche above Macaulay, Byron and Sh.e.l.ley above Tennyson and Rossetti, Ibsen above Scott. Yet there are many poets who made no distinct original contribution to a new morality, but expressed common emotions so humanely, and powerfully, that we think of them as poets of a very high order. The d.i.c.kens of the _Christmas Carol_ and the Burns of the love songs were not original but they are great nevertheless by the infectious depicting of universal emotion, which is always of highest importance in literature. Though there is nothing new in a novel like _Eugenie Grandet_ but a wonderful description of a miser, it is poetry of a very high order, for an account of a pa.s.sion in an intense manner is great poetry. Most of Hafiz's poems record his loves, but though he was a liberal and against the asceticism of his day, he was in the main not an exponent of anything new; nevertheless, he is a poet of a high order.

The world usually does not recognize the original poet and accepts a poet of the second order as one of the first order, but posterity adjusts the matter. Sh.e.l.ley and Ibsen finally won their places and I think to-day the growing coldness to Scott and Tennyson is due to their lacking in great original ideas.

We need not agree with Shaw when he says that d.i.c.kens, Ruskin and Carlyle made no contributions to the morality of their day. The humanitarian reforms suggested by d.i.c.kens' novels, the conceptions about sincerity in history, and the importance of individualism and the heroic Carlyle and Ruskin's views in art criticism and economics, were all original. They all had in addition the great power of expression, and though they were not always very profound in their views, they are poets of a high order.

A poet, then, is of the first order if he expresses in prose the ecstasy connected with a great original idea of social justice far in advance of his age.

There is an opinion ruling among academic circles, also derived from Aristotle, that poetry is the highest form of literature, and that a verse epic, drama or lyric is, when at its best, always better than any work in prose. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Who would say that great novels like _Don Quixote_, great plays like Ibsen's, great essays like Montaigne's are not superior as literature to many of the best known verse productions. Nor must we a.s.sume that the literature of emotion or ecstasy, whether in prose or verse, is always the highest form of literature. The literature that shows great insight into character, that brims most with intellectual ideas, that is universal and human in interest even if not emotional, ranks higher than poetry which voices no ideas. You will find greater literature in books like Taine's _History of English Literature_, or Hazlitt's essays, even in those pa.s.sages which do not belong to the literature of ecstasy, than in many poems of James Whitcomb Riley or Longfellow. The two latter produced many poems that belong to the literature of emotion, but while they are genuine poets, they are intellectually deficient.

Aesthetics and criticism have tended to place little aesthetic value on the literature of ideas. A pa.s.sage from Hume's _Essays_ is greater as literature than many verses in our magazines. Much literature consists of a succession of ideas or facts, no particular one of which moves us to ecstasy, but the work as a whole does have aesthetic value and yet is not poetry, but has greater literary value than some poetry.

Neither verse poetry, nor the prose literature of ecstasy, then, is the highest literature necessarily. Shakespeare was one of the greatest poets, not only because he depicted emotions, but because his intellect, his psychological insight, his universality, his personality, all combine to make him the great figure he is. He would have continued to be as great a figure even if he had written nothing more than a diary.

It is genius that counts and not the form one uses. To say that the drama or epic is the highest literary form is absurd; it may be the essay, if a genius is using that form.

When we have a description of emotions, we have poetry or the literature of ecstasy. But profound thought may give a work more enduring qualities than ecstasy. A love song by Burns is wonderfully sweet, but I can see no reason why, because it is poetry, we must say that it is a greater piece of literature than even an emotional prose pa.s.sage out of Nietzsche or Carlyle at their best. Goethe's prose essays are profound and are often greater as literature than his lyrics. There are intellectual pa.s.sages in _Wilhelm Meister_ that are superior as literature to emotional scenes in _Faust_ as literature.

Critics like Henry Newbolt are supporting the view that poetry must be in touch with life. Though he clings to the idea that poetry and rhythm go together he thinks that the natural tendency of poetic rhythm will be towards perpetual change; the value of his book, however, consists especially in a chapter on "Poetry and Politics." He recognizes that both reason and intuition play a part in poetry; men are not divided into men of thought and men of feeling, the one speaking the language of science, the other that of poetry. If man is a reasoning animal, he also is a creature of instinct as well as of thought. Hence poetry depends on science, the facts of which become part of our imagination. The poet builds a more livable world; he may write great political poetry if he does not become a partisan. Poetry seeks to change human feeling; that is what the Prophets did, and they were in a sense political poets.

"Great poetry," says Newbolt, "is the poetry which has the power to stir many men and stir them deeply," but is especially great when it "is the expression of our consciousness of this world, tinged with man's universal longing for a world more perfect, nearer to the heart's desire."

Newbolt finds that the reason so much religious poetry is futile is because it is remote from earth. But he finds in the _Psalms_ a fervor of patriotism and moral enthusiasm that he compares to the common liturgical poetry "as a great and sonorous bell to the vague whistle of the wind." They preach no dogma, they are remote from practical politics, they are rooted in human emotions, and are the product of no particular church. That is why they always move.