The Literature of Ecstasy Part 5

CHAPTER IV

PROSE THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY

Wordsworth believed that the language used by people in poetry should be that of the natural language of men under the influence of their feelings and that the diction of metrical poetry should differ in no wise from that of prose. Yet the only writers who use the natural diction of men are novelists, prose dramatists and short story writers, and, curiously enough, because they did not write verse, it has not often been suspected that these men were poets. Wordsworth's views are really proofs that poetry is found in prose, for the prose writers comply with his requirements of using in their compositions the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. They also comply with Wordsworth's definition of poetry, recording "emotions recollected in tranquillity."

Hazlitt has ably summed up the influence of the French Revolution on Wordsworth. Our poet did away with mythological references, with tales about legendary characters. He wrote about the emotions of the common people and introduced no far-fetched metaphors, nor made pedantic allusions.

Wordsworth, however, did not claim, as Coleridge thought he did, that the language of verse poetry must be that of ignorant people. Wordsworth never a.s.serted that he wanted the poets to use the language of peasants, except when peasants were portrayed and represented as speaking. He simply protested against stilted, artificial language in verse poetry.

He held the use of such language in verse poetry to be ridiculous, as it was in prose. He was not an exponent of prose poetry, even though he laid little stress on the importance of metre. As the authors of the article on Wordsworth in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ state, the farthest he went in defense of prose structure in poetry was to say that if the words in verse happened to be in the order of prose, they were not necessarily prosaic in the sense of unpoetic. He did not (unfortunately) try to eliminate metre in poetry. He no doubt agreed with Coleridge's own defense of meter in the _Biographia Literaria_. He did not write against his own theory, for he always employed metre and--except in some ballads--a diction that was even literary.

Though both Wordsworth and Coleridge were not overawed by the necessity of metre in poetry, they believed in its use, and were opposed to prose poetry. Coleridge, however, wrote a prose poem _The Wanderings of Cain_ and some of his essays are prose poetry. Coleridge also devoted an entire chapter in his _Biographia Literaria_ to the defense of metre as a vehicle for poetry. He attributes the origin of metre to the fact that the mind makes a conscious effort to hold pa.s.sion in check by fettering it with regular numbers. On the contrary, this conscious check is due to imitation of old examples, to fear in defying the critics, for the natural language of pa.s.sion is irregular rhythm, and it is impatient of being confined in regular, artificial numbers. Coleridge thinks the effect of metre is "to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and the attention" by the continued excitement of surprise. I submit that metre often distracts the attention from the poem's real object, which is to depict ecstasy. Metre often diverts our ear to the singsong tone in which the emotions are couched. Instead of adding to the vivacity and susceptibility of the feelings it really makes us suspect that the poet is not sincere, for the man of emotions expresses them spontaneously and does not trick them out in pattern.

Next, Coleridge a.s.sumes that because of custom, metre must have some property in common with poetry. This argument cannot stand when we take into consideration the innumerable emotional pa.s.sages that have been written in prose. A custom is only a pa.s.sing practice, and free verse writers have abandoned the custom of writing in metre and in many cases have produced good poetry. Lastly, our critic thinks that every poet is impelled "to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establis.h.i.+ng the principle, that all the parts of an organized whole must be a.s.similated to the more important and essential parts." But why a.s.sume that there is no unity of harmonious adjustment in an emotional pa.s.sage in prose? Or why identify such unity with a metrical pattern? Isn't a Psalm in the Bible a unity of harmonious adjustment? Even if the essential part of a poetic piece tends to a.s.sume a certain pattern it does not mean that the whole piece should be given a patterned form.

Some day it will be recognized that a long composition recording different emotions is really unaesthetic in a uniform pattern.

"As to the accents of words," says Bacon, in his _Advancement of Learning_, Book VI, Ch. I, "there is no necessity for taking notice of so trivial a thing; only it may be proper to intimate that these are observed with great exactness, whilst the accents of sentences are neglected; though it is nearly common to all mankind to sink the voice at the end of a period, to raise it in interrogation, and the like."

This pa.s.sage is the first attack in English on metre.

It was Whitman who gave the death blow to metre. He brought poetry back to rhythmical prose, and is the greatest liberator poetry has ever had.

He demonstrated that an entire volume might be written in rhythmical prose (with the lines broken up), and that the product could be the highest poetry. His _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ ignored all the rules laid down in various books on poetics. Whitman has done more than most critics to convey to the world what poetry really is.

"In my opinion," says Whitman, "the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior writers and themes (especially for persiflage and the comic, as there seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow), the truest and greatest _Poetry_ (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and pa.s.sion."

We have long been laboring under the mischievous Aristotelian division of poetry into Epic, Dramatic and Lyric, and critics have exhausted themselves trying to determine which of these was the highest form of poetry.

As a matter of fact, the epic poem was only the primitive author's method of writing a poetical novel centering around wars; or a later poet's imitation of that form. The dramatic poem was another way of telling a story without introducing much narration or description.

Poetry does not inhere in an epic of Homer or a play of Sophocles by virtue of the form, but because of the emotions described, and similar descriptions of emotions are to be found in our fiction and prose plays.

Again we have followed the ancients in subdividing lyric poetry into elegy, pastoral, ode, satire, idyll. The moderns introduced the sonnet, the ballade, the ballad and other forms. These divisions have perverted our knowledge as to the nature of poetry. Any one can make a similar cla.s.sification of the poetry in prose, but it is useless to do so.

Poetry is recorded emotion and depicts various characteristics. The Song of Deborah is a war song, a hymn and a satire, all in one.

Professor Posnett in his _Comparative Literature_ protested long before Croce against these artificial divisions in poetry.

Poetry is the voice of excited man; it is as Baumgarten said--"perfect sensitive speech," a definition that Croce regards as probably the best ever given of poetry, while Saintsbury scoffs at it. It is immaterial whether the rhythm is there or not. Prose is always poetry when it is sensitized. Nietzsche, himself a great poet, also saw this. "Let it be observed," said Nietzsche, "that the great masters of prose have almost always been poets as well, whether openly, or only in secret and for the closet; and in truth one only writes good prose _in view of poetry_." He names Leopardi, Landor, Emerson and Merimee among the great prose writers who were poets. We can add many other writers of essays, dialogues, and criticisms to complement his list.

"The distinction between poetry and prose cannot be justified," said Croce. "Poetry is the language of sentiment; prose of intellect; but since the intellect is also sentiment, in its concretion and reality, so all prose has a poetical side." "There exists poetry without prose, but not prose without poetry." Poetical material permeates the souls of all; any expression of it in verse or prose, in painting or music, is poetry. Since all poetry is expression and all expression lyric, the divisions of different kinds of poetry into epic, dramatic, etc., or different divisions of one poem into scenes, books, chapters, acts, stanzas, paragraphs, are of little importance, and are matters of convenience.

Poetry is essentially lyrical. There is no such thing as dramatic or epic poetry. All poetry is the emotional outcry of the poet or his characters. We may have an emotion recorded in a separate poem called a lyric, or in a speech in a composition divided into acts, following certain rules and known as a drama. Similarly the speeches in epic poems are lyrics. The poetry of Homer or Shakespeare is not epic or dramatic, for poetry is just an emotional outburst. Andromache's speeches and Hamlet's soliloquies could have appeared alone and they would have been considered lyrics; they remain lyrics even in the body of a long composition. The emotional pa.s.sages in all prose works are also lyrical poetry. There is really only one kind of poetry, lyrical poetry, for all poems are emotional outbursts of an individual. Every imaginative literary composition, whether in verse or prose, is made up of lyrical poems, more or less.

One should no more look for a chapter on the drama in a book like this dealing with poetry than for a treatise on the novel. A drama, considered merely as a series of scenes bound together by a plot in a fit manner to be presented on the stage to move people, and based on rules that relate to economy of words, concentration of facts and strikingness of action, is a performance that has a technique of its own; the dramatist is a poet only by virtue of the ecstasy he puts in the work. Considered in its primary significance as a performance where action is the chief feature, the drama becomes poetry in those parts where the action and emotion are concentrated.

It is, however, often difficult to extract scenes from the play, as they lose in effectiveness by being thus separated. But the fact remains that there is no such thing as dramatic poetry, for the essence of all poetry is its lyricism. Dramatic scenes contain the lyric cries of the _dramatis personae_. Action is but the emotional disturbances of the characters and no longer merely means violent conduct, surprises, battles, duels, suicides, murders. All great novels have dramatic scenes and they are often as exuberant in poetry as are similar scenes in plays. We no longer regard as tragedies only those plays in verse where a virtuous person of high degree is in a frightful predicament because of unjust and unlooked-for defeat with fate. No, in spite of Aristotle, the suffering of even a wicked person of low station, depicted as due to his own fault as of Hurstwood in _Sister Carrie_, and described in prose narrative, is also tragedy. There is incidentally no such thing as a comic dramatic poem, but a comic scene may be poetic if it moves to ecstasy (not merely to farcic laughter), and if it is essentially lyrical. Comedy also appears in works of fiction in prose, and may be poetical. Moreover, most performances in prose dialogue or fiction present an admixture of tragic and comic.

Tragedy often presents lyric poems greater than any other work of literature; hence Aristotle and his imitators concluded that a verse tragedy was the highest form of poetry. This is not so. If Shakespeare and Sophocles lived in our day they might have written novels or essays, and I daresay with their genius those novels or essays would have been as good as their plays and would have contained as great poetry.

Our great poets do not owe their greatness to the use of the stereotyped literary metrical forms. A man may have a great gift for the use of these forms and not be a great poet, just as he may be a great poet and fall flat when they enc.u.mber him. Ruskin and d.i.c.kens were great poets, but when we say that their metrical compositions were not great poetry we merely mean that they were not adept in choosing rhymes and complying with metrical rules. To do this requires a distinct gift. An amateur selects forced rhymes and has no ear. Swinburne, besides being a great poet, had a distinct gift of creating melodious verse; but many parodists have shown that they also had this gift without being able to write poetry.

Mrs. Browning was a good poet both in verse and in prose. She wrote her love poems in prose in her letters to her husband, and in verse in the Portuguese sonnets which are nothing more than some of the letters put into metre and rhyme; there are some who think that the letters are the better poetry of the two. Her sentiments did not become poetry because they were put in sonnet form.

The following letter is poetry:

I pour out my thoughts to you, dearest, dearest, as if it were right rather to think of doing myself that good and relief, than of you who have to read all. But you spoil me into an excess of liberty by your tenderness. Best in the world!

Oh--you help me to live--I am better and lighter since I have drawn near to you even on this paper--already I am better and lighter. And now I am going to dream of you . . . to meet you on some mystical landing place . . . in order to be quite well to-morrow. Oh--we are so selfish on this earth, that nothing grieves us very long, let it be ever so grievous, unless we are touched in _ourselves_ . . . in the apple of our eye . . .

in the quick of our heart . . . in _what_ you are and _where_ you are . . . my own dearest beloved! So you need not be afraid for _me_. We all look to our own, as I to _you_; the thunderbolts may strike the tops of the cedars, and, except in the first part, none of us be moved. True it is of me--not of you perhaps, certainly you are better than I in all things.

Best in the world you are--no one is like you. Can you read what I have written? Do not love me less! Do you think that I cannot feel you love me, through all this distance? If you loved me less, I should know, without a word or sign. Because I live by your loving me! (June 24, 1846.)

It took the Greeks and Romans some time to learn that prose was the best medium for philosophy and history. Plato had the good sense to write in prose instead of following the ridiculous method of versifying of the early Greek philosophers, like Parmenides and Empedocles.

In the first century A.D. various Roman historians wrote of historical events in the form of epic poems. These are really histories with a little occasional glimmer of poetry. Thus we had Silius's _Pontica_, Valerius Flaccus's _Argonautica_, Statius's _Thebais_, and Lucan's _Pharsalia_. The last two works were especially admired in the medieval ages when rhymed or metrical historical chronicles were the fas.h.i.+on, and they were favorites of Dante. Very few people to-day read these metrical histories. English literature also is full of metrical and rhymed histories, geographies, criticisms, scientific works, essays, etc. But no one reads Warner's _Albion's England_, Drayton's _Poly Olbion_, or Daniel's _First Four Books of the Civil War_. And Darwin's versified _Botanical Garden_ has been a standing joke.

It is remarkable how past usages in literature influence us. The examples of Lucretius versifying philosophy in his _Nature of Things_, and that of Horace writing literary criticism in verse in his _Art of Poetry_, have been fruitful of mischief. Even much of the lengthy works of Sh.e.l.ley, Byron and Browning would have been better had they been written in prose, and they would have lost none of their poetic qualities. The greatness of the _Ring and the Book_, _Don Juan_ and the _Revolt of Islam_ remains when these works are translated into the prose of another language.

The French have perfected the art of poetical prose,[86:A] or prose poetry, probably more than any other nation. The reason may be that they have not been prolific of good poetry in verse, and have instead reserved their poetry for prose, a more natural medium than Alexandrine lines.

Fenelon was one of the first moderns who attacked verse. In two critical works, _Dialogues on Eloquence_ and _Letters to the French Academy_ (there is an English translation of both, out of print), he emphasized the insignificant part played by versification in poetry. He held that there was no true eloquence without a due mixture of poetry, that poetry was the very soul of eloquence. He said that there were many poets who were poetical without making verses, and he considered versification distinct from poetry. In his definition of poetry he excluded a consideration of versification. He thought the perfection of French verse impossible, that versification loses more than it gains by rhyme, and that French poets were cramped by versification. He wanted superfluous ornaments removed and the necessary parts turned into natural ornaments. Still he did not insist on a complete abandonment of rhyme, but wanted greater freedom. His biographer, St. Cyr, says that Fenelon wanted to abolish verse altogether in French poetry. Fenelon also wrote a novel in prose poetry in 1699, _Telemaque_. But prose poetry existed in France before him, in old romances like the story of _Auca.s.sin and Nicolette_ and in Bossuet's funeral orations. His example was followed by Sainte Pierre, in _Paul and Virginia_, by Prevost in _Manon Lescaut_, by Rousseau and especially by Chateaubriand in _Atala_, _The Genius of Christianity_ and _The Martyrs_. Unfortunately, Fenelon insisted in introducing the cliches of verse into prose; artificial and unnatural language hence ruined some of his work and a.s.sisted in bringing the term prose poetry into contempt.

The French have always regarded the poet in a broader sense than have the English. The article on poetry in the French Encyclopedia deals with prose poems as well as with verse poems. Victor Hugo in his _Shakespeare_, when he calls the lists of poets, mentions prose writers like Diderot, Rousseau, Balzac, Chateaubriand, George Sand, Le Sage and Cervantes. He who was himself a great poet knew that poetry did not depend on metre.

Eugene Veron, the great French critic, author of a valuable work on _aesthetics_ (fortunately translated into English), also takes a broad conception of the term poetry. He says that it would be absurd to deny Moliere's _L'Avare_ is poetry because it is in prose, for poetical, creative imagination and personal emotions are at work here. He states that there was poetry in the story of Don Juan before Corneille put it in verse. Versification, he urges, does not const.i.tute poetry. He sees that verse would not have improved such prose poems as _Paul and Virginia_, _La Mare au Diable_, or _L'Oiseau_ (Michelet), and he places in the front rank of poetry pa.s.sages from Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet (no doubt referring to some of the famous funeral orations) and Mirabeau. He also says it is impossible to refuse to see poetic character in the novel, for this deals with the creation of character and the portrayal of pa.s.sions.

I do not wish to go into the prose poetry written by other nations, for every literature is full of it.

There is a growing tendency in England to encourage prose poetry.[88:A]

De Quincey having made a special plea for impa.s.sioned prose is looked upon as the father of it, though there was prose poetry in English literature from the earliest times; Malory, Sidney, Sir Thomas Browne, Raleigh, Drummond, Milton, Bunyan, Taylor and Fuller were great prose poets.

John Stuart Mill and Lord Beaconsfield both recognized the utterly negligible role of metre in determining the nature of poetry. In an early essay, originally published before he was thirty and collected with another under the t.i.tle _Poetry and Its Varieties_, Mill gives us his definition of poetry. Guided by a statement of the author of the _Corn Law Rhymes_, Ebenezer Elliot, that poetry is impa.s.sioned truth, and by another definition from Blackwood's, that poetry is "man's thought tinged by his feelings," he says, "Every truth which a human being can enunciate, every thought, even every outward impression, which can enter into his consciousness, may become poetry when shown through any impa.s.sioned medium, when invested with the coloring of joy, or grief, or pity, or affection, or admiration, or reverence, or awe, or even hatred, or terror: and, unless so colored, nothing, be it as interesting as it may, is poetry." There is nothing said in this definition about rhythm or metre, and indeed Mill regarded as the vulgarest of all any definition of poetry which confounds it with metrical composition.

An idea emotionally treated becomes poetry whether in prose or verse, whether rhythmical or not. Mill understood that, yet he erred when he a.s.signed a minor role to the emotions excited by the incidents in prose fiction, though it is true that the emotions of excitement wakened by the mere novel of adventure are indicative of a lower order of poetry.

It is to be regretted, however, that about five years later he somewhat modified his main views.

Prose poetry was consciously written by Lord Beaconsfield, who tells us in the early preface to his novel, _Alroy_, that he was trying to write rhythmical prose poetry in that novel. He did not always succeed, but throughout all his novels are found many excellent prose poems. He was writing prose poetry in the early eighteen thirties before Baudelaire, and in some of his tales, like _Pompanilla_, we have prose poems. He often became bombastic, but he was a poet, nevertheless.

Later English critics have returned to the subject of prose poetry.

In his _Aspects of Poetry_ Professor John C. Shairp says that he grants "that the old limits between prose and poetry tend to disappear." He concludes his book with two chapters on prose poets, on Carlyle and Newman. And Courthope, wors.h.i.+pper of metre that he is, concludes his _History of English Poetry_ with a chapter on the poetry in the Waverly Novels. We also recall that Bagehot could see little difference between Tennyson's novels in verse and George Eliot's novels in prose.

A great critic like Pater maintained the rights of the poet in prose. In his essay on Style he said "Prose will exert in due measure all the varied charms of poetry down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, Michelet, or Newman, gives its musical value to every syllable."

The first lengthy and systematic plea for prose poetry I know of in English, outside of Disraeli's and De Quincey's modest apologies for writing in this manner, was made by David Ma.s.son in an essay on _Prose and Verse: De Quincey_, published as a review of De Quincey in 1854. De Quincey's preface, pleading for impa.s.sioned prose, suggested Ma.s.son's essay. Ma.s.son had, however, dwelt on the poetic side of prose the year before in an article on Dallas's _Poetics_, called _Theories of Poetry_.

Both of Ma.s.son's essays are to be found in his _Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, Keats and Other Essays_. Ma.s.son very ingeniously asks why we are not allowed to write prose in the manner that Milton writes in verse, or in the manner of aeschylus in prose translation. He concludes that poetry and prose are not two entirely separate spheres, but intersecting and penetrating. To-day we go even farther than Ma.s.son and urge that prose, except in short lyrics when verse may be used, should be the sole language of pa.s.sion and the imagination. He vindicates De Quincey's right to use impa.s.sioned prose; he quotes as an example of prose poetry a beautiful pa.s.sage from the conclusion of Milton's pamphlet, _Causes That Have Hindered the Reformation in England_, and mentions especially Jean Paul Richter, the prose poet who was responsible for the prose poetry of two disciples, De Quincey and Carlyle. Richter's _Christ and the Universe_ is highly regarded by him as prose poetry.

Ma.s.son's prediction that the time was coming when the best prose should more resemble verse than it had done in the past, and that the best verse should not disdain a certain resemblance to prose, is being fulfilled. Remember Ma.s.son wrote before the _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ appeared, and before the vogue of free verse.

Yet his viewpoint was severely criticized by a scholar like John Earle, whose _English Prose_ contains an attack on prose poetry. Earle says that prose poetry is found chiefly in ages of literary decadence like the Latin Silver Age in writers from Tacitus to Boethius. On the contrary, it is found as well in the golden ages of literature, as, for example, in Sidney's _Arcadia_, which he himself quotes from, in Plato, in Pascal, in Dante's prose. It is strange that this view of Earle's should still largely prevail. Poetry and prose are still regarded by academic scholars like Earle, Saintsbury, Courthope, Bosanquet Watts-Dunton and Gummere as two distinct branches of literature. Earle is right only when he objects to the cliches of verse in prose, but to-day we object to all cliches.