Part 11 (2/2)

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.

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