Part 9 (1/2)
Poetry then must not be timid about dealing with ideas in an emotional or imaginative manner. It may even take up moral problems provided it does not sink into the commonplace ethical purposes that we have in the _Psalm of Life_ and _Excelsior_, two of Longfellow's most inferior and popular poems. An idea that is the result of reason may be uttered with ecstasy, and hence there may be logic in poetry.
In his _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_ in the essay on ”Poetry for Poetry's Sake,” Professor A. C. Bradley takes issue with those who claim that it is no consequence what a poet says but how he says it, and he rightly regards as of small aesthetic value that formalist heresy which encourages men to taste poetry as though it were wine. Poetry inheres in ideas. To insist, as the poetry for poetry's sake school does, that a poem has no more lesson for us than a tree is to inst.i.tute a false comparison, for the tree has a lesson for any one who finds it.
When one finishes a volume of poetry by some of the purely aesthetic poets, one is amazed at the kind of life they embody in art. It is often such a petty life, a talk to a cat, or an imitation of an image of an old poet, or a superabundant reference to flowers. It is not of the substance of which n.o.ble lives are made. We are pained to find that trite utterances or references are tricked out in gaudy images and given forth to the world in large quant.i.ties.
Verses of trivial facts and ideas set forth with artifice are not poetry. Indeed, it is a petty employment for poets to be giving vent to labored conceits about gold fish, and vases, about dandelions and kittens and lollypops, investing none of these themes with imagination or intellect. Man is stirred by thousands of emotions arising from his inability to adjust himself to surroundings, by his thwarted will and suppressed desires. He is often wrapped in gloom for want of real truthful consoling poetry. He experiences tragedies due to conflicts with relatives, friends, to lack of harmony in matrimonial or amorous affairs. His life is often being gradually snuffed out by the prevailing of stupid and deplorable customs; he is often starving or being insufficiently fed, and frequently sees his children in unhappy circ.u.mstances. He is the victim of tyrants and unjust social systems, and is engaged in soul-killing occupations. He faces the great mysteries of existence, the riddle of the Sphinx. He witnesses cruelties of all kinds, persecution of races and individuals, mismanagement of affairs, lynchings, ma.s.sacres, wars and imprisonments. Hypocrisy and vindictiveness are rife and man suffers thereby. He thirsts for beauty, he pants for happiness.
Yet poets who may find numerous and important subjects for the literature of ecstasy, are busy writing sugared verses about mosaics, candles, and puppies, and arranging vowel sounds and rhythms. Men's souls are starving to be fed with poetry and the versifiers polish and file and chisel verses on themes that interest no one. As Horace says, the mountains are in labor and the issue is but a ridiculous mouse.
Indeed it is not the subject the poet chooses that one objects to, but to the absence of ideas, or the shallowness or triviality of the idea.
Burns took a daisy and made it the symbol of the racked poet, and could write about a mouse or a louse and deduce some universal idea. Sh.e.l.ley and Keats could endure emotions and thoughts by singing of a skylark or a nightingale. But the petty poet cannot deduce anything but a trifling idea, no matter what theme he selects.
Another feature which distinguishes the minor poet in prose or verse is his investing a trite idea with an emotion out of all proportion. He hales with enthusiasm a commonplace, he gets into ecstasy about that toward which an intelligent man displays little or no emotion. It is the distinction of the unknown author of the ancient Greek fragment _On the Sublime_ that he deprecates the tendency to wax emotional about the unemotional. The silly ideas and emotions about which versifiers get excited are often an index to their own moral and intellectual failing, as well as their aesthetic deficiency. From Sainte-Beuve Matthew Arnold appropriately quotes a saying to the effect that, in judging a work, the French question not only whether they are moved by it, but whether also they have the right to be moved by it.
So when we look through much of the so-called popular poetry, we see why we cannot often admit it to the high realm of the literature of ecstasy.
It contains the childish sentimental excitement about facts that every thinking man takes for granted. When we read the eloquent sermon on the advantage of practicing justice, we wonder at the folly of making a comment about so obvious a truism. It is for this reason that moral axioms lack the elements of poetry, because they do not admit of exposition with appreciable ecstasy. Verse is full of stale themes sung over so often that we almost rebel when the new poet comes along and sings over the same old story.
It requires a great intellect to know when to judge rightly about the propriety of one's emotions for the subject of literature. We do not think that it is the subject matter of emotion to go into ecstatic praises, for example, over a man who supports his child. We find that animals provide food for their young; hence it is not fit to grow eloquent because a man does what even the lowest animal has the instinct to do.
Conventional morality only becomes poetry when colored by the imagination or ill.u.s.trated by an unusually pleasing ecstatic presentment. When Fuller, for instance, says that we should not mock at the defects of people who are physically or mentally disabled, he utters a stale truism that is not poetry but ethics. When he adds that it is pitiable to beat a cripple with his own crutches, the little prose pa.s.sage is lifted up into poetry, for we are brought into a state of ecstasy by the imaginative ill.u.s.tration. Similarly take some of the instances of self-sacrifice by the common people which Bret Harte and O.
Henry delighted in depicting. Some of their stories become poetry by emotional presentation of a trite idea.
There must also be more or less sympathy with the poet's viewpoint. ”All right human song,” says Ruskin in his _Lectures on Art_, ”is the finished expression by art, of the joy or grief of n.o.ble persons, for right causes. And accurately in proportion to the rightness of the cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money.”
Ruskin may have corrupted our artistic outlook somewhat by insisting on an ethical aim. Yet we should remember that our aesthetic feelings are influenced by our moral outlook. While we should not seek an ethical aim in literature as an end in itself, while we should shun the preacher of commonplaces who poses as a poet, we cannot respond to the sympathetic depicting of an emotion which we ourselves could never feel because of repugnance to it.
To appreciate a poem truly, we must feel as the poet does and sympathize with the motives that inspired his feelings. The reasons that urge him to express his emotions must appear to us just ones. If our intellect is far greater than that of the poet, we shall find that many of the causes that inspire him to sing as he does would not at all arouse in us the emotions experienced by him; his poem is not the greatest art to us. If his intellect is superior to ours, we shall not like his work; but then it will be because he is more advanced than we are.
If a poet were to sing of an incestuous love; or decry sympathy for the distressed; or to laud a cruel action; or to gloat over the schemes of the fraudulent; or sing favorably of any action which we think a base one, his poem would not be art for it does not evoke emotional response from anybody.
Poe laid down the principle of art for art's sake that poetry deals with beauty alone and that the only faculty for appreciating it is that of taste. He held that poetry had nothing to do with truth or duty; that the intellect and the moral sense were concerned with these and hence had no field for exercising themselves either in writing or judging poetry.
As a matter of fact all three faculties, taste, intellect and moral sense, are called into use in creating and appreciating the highest kind of poetry or any other form of literature. There is no reason why a poet should not make use of all three faculties if he has them all developed.
Goethe and Ibsen possessed them. The highest form of taste can scarcely be attained unless the poet's intellect and moral sense are fine. For falsehood and sin are repugnant to our taste for beauty. A book that is absolutely tainted with moral perversities or shows a foolish and inconceivable conception of intellectual values will be certainly deficient in some phases of beauty. Our consciences and our minds are unconsciously consulted in our conception of the beautiful. Not only truth, but duty is beauty. Even Poe maintained that Taste held intimate relations with Intellect and Truth and he therefore placed it between them.
The greatest cla.s.sics are those that appeal to all three faculties in us and those works which offend both our intellect and moral sense do not completely satisfy our sense of beauty. The best critics from Hazlitt to Brandes understood that. Fortunately many of the cla.s.sics have lost only in parts their moral and intellectual value, and hence still hold sway over us. And sometimes the beauty is so intensely striking that we charitably overlook faults of morality and intellect.
As Professor Woodberry says in his _A New Defense of Poetry_ in _The Heart of Man_: ”Can there by any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation.”
The connection between art and ethics is closer than some critics imagine. Spingarn was mistaken when he said that we have done with all moral judgment of literature. A book is often artistically great chiefly because its ethical viewpoint is right. The rightness of it is often what creates the ecstasy. Let us take Ibsen's _Ghosts_. The real greatness of this play is not chiefly in its picture of heredity or of a man becoming an idiot. Its real value lies in its att.i.tude towards the marriage problem and its contrast of the two characters, Mrs. Alving, the representative of the new order, and of Pastor Manders, representing society. The leading question there is, should Mrs. Alving have gone back to her husband, knowing that he was possessed of a loathsome disease which might be inherited by any possible progeny? Was she justified in leaving him? That these are the important questions is evident from the motive which prompted Ibsen to write the play, namely, to answer the critics of the _Doll's House_. The conclusion reached by Ibsen from the terrible picture is that Mrs. Alving was wrong in going back to her husband, that there are times when it is justifiable to leave one's husband. This is the moral lesson of the play, and is conveyed with great ecstasy; in fact, the moral intensifies the ecstasy.
A conventional playwright would have concluded that Mrs. Alving should have remained with her husband in obedience to duty, that the simple-minded Pastor was in the right. The play even if handled as well as by Ibsen could not have been the great work of literature that it is, if written in defense of the conventional moral code. A great author attacks conventional morality to battle for a higher morality.
The moral ideas of an author have much to do with the literary excellence of his work.[133:A] But this does not mean that we must go back to the old Greek idea that poetry be a vehicle for the inculcation of the commonplace ethics. Nor does it imply that we cannot appreciate a poet because we disapprove of the religion or political party with which he is affiliated.
In the conclusion of his essay on ”How a Young Man Should Study Poetry,”
Plutarch shows that the philosopher and the poet are engaged in the same mission. He takes pa.s.sages from the poets and shows us that they are similar to those he selects from the philosophers. The doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras agree with the ideas by the dramatists spoken on the stage, and with those that lyricists sang to the harp. We may accept Plutarch's views except in so far as he urges that poetry should preach dogmatic and conventional ethics.