Part 17 (1/2)

Pater in his _Renaissance_ took the position that poetry has a personal message for us, an effect on us individually. We cannot learn this effect by following metaphysical discourses on the relation of beauty to truth or experience. In his _Appreciations_ in the essay on ”Style”

Pater identifies beauty with expression, just as Croce did after him, and Lessing and Winckelmann before him. ”All beauty,” wrote Pater, ”is in the long run only _fullness_ of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.” Here we have Croce's conception of beauty, the word defined as it is being understood to-day. It is in this sense only, the sense of the most adequate expression of emotion, that the word beauty is the same as poetry, or literature of ecstasy.

Formerly treatises were written about curved lines, elegant diction, etc., on the theory that beauty was the subject of art. But a peasant's description in slang of his emotions, an author's description of a corpse that is rotting, or of a woman giving birth to a child, or of a man going mad, or of a hideous degenerate crime, are also beautiful, for since expression is beauty, the narration or description of the ugly is a work of art. The word beauty in its popular sense no longer has aesthetic significance. Even when it was really believed that art dealt with beautiful objects and deeds, the aesthetician had to admit that there was nothing beautiful in tragedies. Nor does beauty mean elegant expression. Many stories and poems in slang and dialect belong to the literature of beauty. The expression of emotions, the delineation of ideas, the drawing of characters is beauty, if effectively done. The reader need not have what the old aestheticians called ”taste”; he must only respond sympathetically to the ecstasy of the author.

I have made no attempt to set confines to poetry, for no two people will ever agree as to whether a literary performance has sufficient ecstasy or whether the ecstasy is of a high strain to ent.i.tle it to be called poetry, but I believe all will agree that ecstasy is necessary.

I believe, however, that many authoritative works and essays on Poetry, from Aristotle to our own day, are obsolete. I shall mention only Watts-Dunton's article on Poetry in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ which has furnished modern critics with many of their ideas. The article is beyond question one of the most interesting produced in England in many years. Watts-Dunton has a true conception of poetry when he calls it the product of inspiration or concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional language. He believes, however, versification is necessary to all poetry. He also makes too much of the divisions of poetry into the various orders, like epic, lyric, drama, an artificial division adopted by all critics from Aristotle. Watts-Dunton's divisions of poets into those with an absolute or personal vision and those with a relative vision, is arbitrary and confused. All poets are personal, and even when they depict other people's emotions objectively, the product is personal because touched with the creator's personality. He is also too much under the influence of Hegel's _Aesthetics_.

Watts-Dunton could not understand the value of impa.s.sioned prose or its right to be called poetry. He once said to William Michael Rossetti that the latter's reputation as a critic would soon vanish because of his admiration for Whitman, whom he himself detested. He is blamed with having done much to quench the poetic fire of Swinburne's muse, for whose changed att.i.tude towards Whitman he also was responsible. He had no sympathy with the poetry that had a social message and he did not understand its effect as a catharsis. Watts-Dunton cannot remain our leading authority on poetry. His essay belongs to the extinct cla.s.s of _Ars Poetica_, with Boileau and Opitz.

Ecstasy is then the substance of poetry, and there are all kinds of ecstasy, from a very exalted to a primitive order. It includes the scientist's or philosopher's pa.s.sion for knowledge, the idealist's devotion to a cause. It comprehends the warrior's madness for battle, the patriot's ardor to die for his country, and man's submission to his G.o.d. Ecstasy holds in its sway the man who is moved by reading a great work of art. It sweeps every one who is in the throes of ambition. Those who enjoy nature, athletics, and games are in the throes of ecstasy.

Those who are bemoaning the death of one they love, or rejoicing in the emergence of dear ones from illness or danger, those who take pride in watching their children grow up, those who exult in the pleasure of friends.h.i.+p, are all in ecstasy.

Every one who builds dreams and sees visions of better things, every one who fulminates against ugliness and wrong, is possessed by ecstasy. Are you in a state of rapture because your love is returned, or in one of despair, because it is denied?--you are in ecstasy. Are you brooding over a sense of wrong or injustice, are you moved by the spectacle of grief?--you are in ecstasy. Ecstasy is intoxication, in a good and in a bad sense. The origin of the drinking-song was due to the pleasant emotions and dreams which the indulgence in alcohol aroused.

The mystic who thinks he is in personal communion with G.o.d, the lunatic who thinks demons are prodding him, the spiritualist who imagines he talks to his dead son, the child who is in communication with animals and supernatural creatures, are all victims of some form of ecstasy.

It is the great poet who knows which is a high order of ecstasy to choose, what att.i.tude to take towards it and in what words and form to convey it.

The people do like poetry and read it, but are unaware of the fact. For the great bulk of the poetry read by the people is the prose fiction that they find exciting and stimulating. This fiction is usually of a very low order. Nevertheless good poetry is to be found in the simple and emotional prose of the world, in the dramatic situations in novels, in the best pa.s.sages of short stories. Prose poetry is the most democratic and natural poetry, at least in form, and you can rely on the public to appreciate some of it.

The poetry in d.i.c.kens is democratic poetry. The drawing of such characters as the elder Pegotty and Joe Gargery, wherein he shows the n.o.ble virtues residing in common people, is poetry that the public can appreciate.

Poetry cannot, however, always be democratic, for when it deals with ideas beyond the people, such as you find in Nietzsche and Ibsen, it does not succeed in evoking the intended response and sympathy from the public, which rejects such ideas.

So when we hear people say that they do not care for poetry we see that they mean they have an aversion to verse in metre or rhyme or rhythm.

But they will weep as they read of the death of Little Nell and be moved by the sorrows of Anna Karenina, and be stirred by the tragedy of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. Like the gentleman in Moliere's play who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, these readers are fond of poetry without being aware of the fact. Every lover of good literature appreciates poetry though he reads no verse. He is touched by the ecstasy which tinctures all emotional or beautiful prose literature.

Here the poetic is divested of metaphors and rhythm and trappings and verbal tricks; here it is not hidden by obscurity or spoiled by affectation.

You love poetry if you are touched by the lines in Burke's _Letter to a n.o.ble Lord_, where the great orator, desolate because of the loss of his son and embittered by criticism for accepting a pension, bares the state of his soul.

The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered upon me. I am stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth. . . . I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive myself if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world. . . .

I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors.

You are hearing Heine the poet when he describes in his _Confessions_ his feelings as he lay on his mattress grave, no less than when you peruse his love woes in verse.

What does it avail me that at banquets my health is pledged in the choicest wines and drunk from golden goblets, when I, myself, severed from all that makes life pleasant may only wet my lips with an insipid emotion? What does it avail me that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel wreaths, if meanwhile the shriveled fingers of an aged nurse press a blister of Spanish flies behind the ears of my actual body. What does it avail me that all the roses of s.h.i.+raz so tenderly glow and bloom for me? Alas! s.h.i.+raz is two thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where, in the dreary solitude of my sick-room, I have nothing to smell, unless it be the perfume of warmed napkins.

When you read Hardy's _Return of the Native_ and reach the part where Yeobright reproaches his wife Eustacia for causing the death of his mother by closing the door on her so as not to be detected with a lover, you are in the midst of poetry.

Call her to mind--think of her--what goodness there was in her: it showed in every line of her face! . . . O! couldn't you see what was best for you, but you must bring a curse upon me, and agony and death upon her, by doing that cruel deed!

. . . Eustacia, didn't any tender thought of your own mother lead you to think of being gentle to mine at such a time of weariness? Did not one grain of pity _enter_ your heart as she turned away?

If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of the following pa.s.sage from Lafcadio Hearn's ”Of Moon-Desire,” from the volume _Exotics and Retrospectives_, you delight in poetry.

And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage nature that spring from the deepest sources of our being . . . would seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.