Part 11 (1/2)
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.