Part 13 (2/2)
Poetry such as we find in the great English verse or prose poets of the nineteenth century has little relation to dancing, music or singing.
Take the Shakespearean plays, the tragedies of _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_, where we have philosophizing and descriptions of painful crises which are great poetry. A poet does not have to sing a great idea, nor dance to it, nor put it to music. Ibsen and Balzac are poets and yet they are far away from dancing, singing or music. Though most good singers are poets, one does not have to be a singer to be a poet. Then take great impa.s.sioned oratory or beautiful emotional word painting in prose or verse, or any idea bathed in feeling. They may all be poetry and need not be--in fact, by their nature, are not--related to dance, music and song.
An autobiographical verse poem like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, or a series of impa.s.sioned ideas like Lucretius's _Nature of Things_, or a novel in verse like _Aurora Leigh_ is not related to song, yet it is poetry in parts. (This does not mean that poetry is not the soul of music or dancing.)
There is nothing more amusing than to read the innumerable and contradictory theories about the origin of poetry. Many believe that the first poetry was pastoral poetry, since the shepherd's life was, after hunting, the first occupation appropriate and conducive to composing poetry. Scaliger, Fontenelle and Pope endorsed this view. Others believe that the original poetry was written to express man's religious emotions; his prayers and hymns to his G.o.ds are considered by many the first poetry. Again the communistic needs of the clans are supposed to have invited the poet to write. Celebration of tribal victories, praise of heroes, incitement to martial courage and revenge, the virtues of the clan, were supposed to be the first function of the poets. Epics and ballads are cited in proof of this. Again, satires and invectives are thought to be the first forms as they were used by the bards, who were also magicians and hurled them as potent forces against the enemy.
Thomas Peac.o.c.k believed eulogies const.i.tuted the first poetry of the human race. Then the proverb and parable have their devotees, as the first imaginative representation of the common thinking of the earliest people, and as the readiest to lend themselves to the use of verse patterns. One could go on naming various theories that have been advanced as to what kind of poetry is earliest; there is the poem which designates the awakening of a moral conscience; there is the mythical tale reciting the dream desires of the tribe; the song chanted at various labors and toilings of the common people; the chorus which served as an accompaniment to holiday celebrations and nature wors.h.i.+p; the chanting of the first cantors or priests and the responses of the congregation; there are the ecstatic utterances of the earliest prophets, soothsayers and magicians; the admonitions of counselors and legislators; the personal grievances and complaints recited by those seeking redress before the a.s.sembly or chief; marriage hymns, love poems and elegies; all of these are separately cited as the original springs from which later poetry developed.
The critics a.s.sume that man was originally possessed of one emotion only, which he celebrated, or that only one feeling predominated to which he gave vent. Now, as a matter of fact, early man was subject to multifarious emotions just as we are to-day, and he voiced them all, in speech, later writing them down in prose and finally in some verse pattern. Some of these emotions were originally written down with rhythm and repet.i.tion. There really was no state when poetry first began, for the first spoken poetry is as early as human speech which has always been used to express emotions.
Written poetry is merely the mechanical transmission of spoken poetry.
We cannot ignore the poetry of nations which has been handed down by tradition and never been reduced to writing.
The mental process of composing poetry to-day is no different from what it ever was. Different people express verbally the ranges of all the emotions and several individuals give us the written expression of these moods in good form, so as to evoke sympathy in the hearer or reader. It is true, in early times the religious and martial emotions were much expressed, but this does not prove that religious or warlike feelings alone gave rise to the art of poetry. Every emotion man felt gave rise to the art of poetry. Poetry is the expression of all the emotions and is born with speech and hence is universal expression and the most ancient art we possess.
Poetry is, however, so often the expression of a personal complaint, the expression of a repression, that we may say that its real origin to-day, and at all times, is the prose elegy. The person who pours out his griefs is psychologically the poet in action. Attempts have been made by Greek scholars to show that both the epic and the drama had their origin at public funerals where elegies were recited instead of at the Dionysian rites. This is very plausible. The pang of death was one of the causes that led to the creation of poetry, especially since early man was carried off too frequently by wars, plagues and wild animals.
One should add that the pangs of the loss of one's mate, the grief resulting from being worsted in the battle for the female, were other contributing causes of the creation of poetry. In short, the origin of poetry was personal, and much ancient poetry dealt with a lament of some kind. This has been the characteristic of poetry ever since. Grief is the source of poetry. Note the number of wailing poems in Irish and Scotch literature where the death of a husband in war, or the loss of love, plays a part. Much Anglo-Saxon poetry is elegiac. The earliest poems from Egypt, China, j.a.pan contain laments. Savage literature is full of them. The hymn is really a lament in the form of a plea. The dirge, the threnody, the elegy, these const.i.tute the bulk of much poetry, ancient and modern. Burns's poems are chiefly dirges of some kind. The dirge is most human and appealing to us. Some of the most effective poetry in the Bible are the cries of David in the _Psalms_ and the dirges in _Lamentations_.
The modern elegy whether in prose or verse, whether it laments death or lost love, is the direct offspring of the earliest savage cry of grief.
The savage wailed in public as the poet does. Our novelists still do unavoidably the same thing, often covertly. When Tolstoy wrote of the death of Levin's brother in _Anna Karenina_ or _Ivan Ilyitch_, he was actually bemoaning his own brother, whose death made a lasting impression upon him.
Gummere thinks that the early poetry of man was communal and that modern personal lyric poetry is a development from communal poetry. Surely Professor Gummere was aware that among the religious and communal poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, we have such a fine elegy as _The Wanderer_ and such a beautiful dream poem as _The Phnix_. It is a great mistake to think that personal poetry is of modern growth, dating from Villon. It has been more developed in modern times. And then there is much of the personal element in this so-called communal poetry. The man who sang for his tribe in ancient times felt with his tribe, and hence was both communal and personal.
The research into the origins of poetry can be made in the soul of any writer to-day. The same psychological mechanisms that are at work in the composition of his poem were at work in the production of the most crude savage verbal outpourings. It is a personal repression leading to the utterance of a complaint or the building of a dream-world. Keble was one of the few critics who considered the personal complaint the chief origin of poetry.
Schopenhauer defined poetry as one of the arts whose mission was to reveal an idea in the Platonic sense, that is, the permanent essential forms of the world and all its phenomena; art to him was a way of looking at things independent of the principle of sufficient reason. In accordance with his philosophy he regards ideas as the objectivity of the thing in itself, the will. He looks upon the different grades of the objectivation of the will as fixed. The result is that he considers the peculiar end of all the fine arts ”to elucidate the objectivation of will at the lowest grades of its visibility, in which it shows itself as the dumb unconscious tendency of the ma.s.s in accordance with laws, and yet already reveals a breach of the unity of will with itself in a conflict between gravity and rigidity,” while tragedy ”presents to us at the highest grades of the objectivation of will this very conflict with itself in terrible magnitude and distinctness.” (_World as Will and Idea_, V. 1, p. 330.)
All this is saying in philosophical terms what we know has been the mission of art, the portrayal of man defeated in his blind and impotent desires. No one denies that poetry must and always will portray man in such circ.u.mstances. Freud has restated the problem when he showed that poets deal with their own repressions.
One cannot accept Schopenhauer's views that the aim of art is to annihilate the will to live. He failed to see that much of this tragic literature acts as a relief to us and makes us want to live all the more.
Dr. Arthur H. Fairchild deserves credit for a.s.signing high importance to poetry when he says that it is a means of self-realization and is a biological necessity. In his _The Making of Poetry_ he expresses what is really the psychoa.n.a.lytical theory which sees in poetry a means of freeing oneself of complexes, a way of restoring oneself to a better state of mind, a cure for incipient neurosis. When we are sad, the reading of sad poetry relieves us. As Emerson said, ”Poetry is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.” The toiler reads of other toilers in literature, say in Zola's _Germinal_ or Hauptmann's _Weavers_, or Sinclair's _Jungle_, and his emotions are discharged. It is true he may be driven to action, but the poet has nothing to do with that. The lover, unhappy in his love, finds help in hearing a poet express his own surcharged feelings resulting from love troubles. The reader may by reading be prevented from going mad. The great public which does not read good literature finds relief in plays, moving pictures, magazine stories or newspapers, all of which, while it is not generally good poetry, may have the effect of a catharsis on the public's rudely developed aesthetic sense.
Mankind hungers for poetry. Those who are unable to appreciate it in higher form, resort to imitations and subst.i.tutes, which express their emotions and relieve them. He who can read and enjoy the great masters of prose and verse, or appreciate good music and painting, does not have to resort to the political meeting or religious revivals to have his emotions played on. Athletic contests like baseball, football and prize fights usually help people to express and relieve surcharged emotions.
The love for cheap forms of movies and card games has its origin in a desire for emotional discharge. Man resorts to every measure to give his emotions play. He reads newspapers and trashy magazines, he likes to hear melodramas and ranting orators, often because he has a love for emotional excitement which he cannot satisfy by literature of the best kind. He cannot concentrate, he cannot think clearly, he is ignorant of the simplest principles of literary art; he cannot read poetry, yet he hungers for it. His dormant instincts will even seek satisfaction in condemnation and persecution to satisfy such emotions which he cannot express by reading.
The creation and reading of poetry in prose or verse is an achievement common to man alone of the animals. He is not separated from them by moral or intellectual faculties, for animals have these, but by his faculty to create art and make others share enjoyment of them. It may be that the spider and the bee derive aesthetic satisfaction from contemplating the web or the hive they build, or the bird gets artistic pleasure from the song it sings or hears, or any animal may win sympathy from another by some mute act, but man alone puts his emotions and ideas in words in an endurable work of art so as to relieve himself and move others. What separates man from animals is not then religion--is not the religion of a dog centered in his master as Anatole France has so quaintly shown--but the ability to create and enjoy poetry, by which I mean literature in its highest prose or verse form, music, painting and sculpture.
And a life devoted to poetry is the best life we can seek. Let a man have his necessities satisfied, and there is no higher form of life than to enjoy and if possible to create poetry. Poetry makes us want to live and gives us zest in life. Life exists for sensations and we get our sensations out of poetry. Life exists for the enjoyment and creation of poetry. The unlettered savage has his craving for poetry satisfied in his dancing, and war cries, in religion and tribal customs. The child has it satisfied in his toys and games. Adult man appeases his hunger for poetry in diverse ways. Literature, art and music are so far the highest forms of poetry we know, and in literature I include philosophy or thought, in prose as well as verse.
Poetry acts as a necessary relief to us for emotions and ideas that seek expression, and is hence more real than any other form of life.
Our views of poetry from a psychoa.n.a.lytic point of view finds confirmation even in the Bible. One of the leading prophets and the leading psalmists has each told us in scorching words how he felt before he created. Jeremiah says of G.o.d, ”His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay,” Ch. 20, v. 9. David also said, ”My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue,”
Psalms, Ch. 39, v. 3. Both of these poets had made resolutions to keep silent, but could not; their choked emotions burned like fire. Their disturbed souls sought relief by expression. Thus the great prophecies and psalms had a subjective origin and a homeopathic effect upon their authors, and they have this effect on us to-day.
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