The Literature of Ecstasy Part 9

Poetry then must not be timid about dealing with ideas in an emotional or imaginative manner. It may even take up moral problems provided it does not sink into the commonplace ethical purposes that we have in the _Psalm of Life_ and _Excelsior_, two of Longfellow's most inferior and popular poems. An idea that is the result of reason may be uttered with ecstasy, and hence there may be logic in poetry.

In his _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_ in the essay on "Poetry for Poetry's Sake," Professor A. C. Bradley takes issue with those who claim that it is no consequence what a poet says but how he says it, and he rightly regards as of small aesthetic value that formalist heresy which encourages men to taste poetry as though it were wine. Poetry inheres in ideas. To insist, as the poetry for poetry's sake school does, that a poem has no more lesson for us than a tree is to inst.i.tute a false comparison, for the tree has a lesson for any one who finds it.

When one finishes a volume of poetry by some of the purely aesthetic poets, one is amazed at the kind of life they embody in art. It is often such a petty life, a talk to a cat, or an imitation of an image of an old poet, or a superabundant reference to flowers. It is not of the substance of which n.o.ble lives are made. We are pained to find that trite utterances or references are tricked out in gaudy images and given forth to the world in large quant.i.ties.

Verses of trivial facts and ideas set forth with artifice are not poetry. Indeed, it is a petty employment for poets to be giving vent to labored conceits about gold fish, and vases, about dandelions and kittens and lollypops, investing none of these themes with imagination or intellect. Man is stirred by thousands of emotions arising from his inability to adjust himself to surroundings, by his thwarted will and suppressed desires. He is often wrapped in gloom for want of real truthful consoling poetry. He experiences tragedies due to conflicts with relatives, friends, to lack of harmony in matrimonial or amorous affairs. His life is often being gradually snuffed out by the prevailing of stupid and deplorable customs; he is often starving or being insufficiently fed, and frequently sees his children in unhappy circ.u.mstances. He is the victim of tyrants and unjust social systems, and is engaged in soul-killing occupations. He faces the great mysteries of existence, the riddle of the Sphinx. He witnesses cruelties of all kinds, persecution of races and individuals, mismanagement of affairs, lynchings, ma.s.sacres, wars and imprisonments. Hypocrisy and vindictiveness are rife and man suffers thereby. He thirsts for beauty, he pants for happiness.

Yet poets who may find numerous and important subjects for the literature of ecstasy, are busy writing sugared verses about mosaics, candles, and puppies, and arranging vowel sounds and rhythms. Men's souls are starving to be fed with poetry and the versifiers polish and file and chisel verses on themes that interest no one. As Horace says, the mountains are in labor and the issue is but a ridiculous mouse.

Indeed it is not the subject the poet chooses that one objects to, but to the absence of ideas, or the shallowness or triviality of the idea.

Burns took a daisy and made it the symbol of the racked poet, and could write about a mouse or a louse and deduce some universal idea. Sh.e.l.ley and Keats could endure emotions and thoughts by singing of a skylark or a nightingale. But the petty poet cannot deduce anything but a trifling idea, no matter what theme he selects.

Another feature which distinguishes the minor poet in prose or verse is his investing a trite idea with an emotion out of all proportion. He hales with enthusiasm a commonplace, he gets into ecstasy about that toward which an intelligent man displays little or no emotion. It is the distinction of the unknown author of the ancient Greek fragment _On the Sublime_ that he deprecates the tendency to wax emotional about the unemotional. The silly ideas and emotions about which versifiers get excited are often an index to their own moral and intellectual failing, as well as their aesthetic deficiency. From Sainte-Beuve Matthew Arnold appropriately quotes a saying to the effect that, in judging a work, the French question not only whether they are moved by it, but whether also they have the right to be moved by it.

So when we look through much of the so-called popular poetry, we see why we cannot often admit it to the high realm of the literature of ecstasy.

It contains the childish sentimental excitement about facts that every thinking man takes for granted. When we read the eloquent sermon on the advantage of practicing justice, we wonder at the folly of making a comment about so obvious a truism. It is for this reason that moral axioms lack the elements of poetry, because they do not admit of exposition with appreciable ecstasy. Verse is full of stale themes sung over so often that we almost rebel when the new poet comes along and sings over the same old story.

It requires a great intellect to know when to judge rightly about the propriety of one's emotions for the subject of literature. We do not think that it is the subject matter of emotion to go into ecstatic praises, for example, over a man who supports his child. We find that animals provide food for their young; hence it is not fit to grow eloquent because a man does what even the lowest animal has the instinct to do.

Conventional morality only becomes poetry when colored by the imagination or ill.u.s.trated by an unusually pleasing ecstatic presentment. When Fuller, for instance, says that we should not mock at the defects of people who are physically or mentally disabled, he utters a stale truism that is not poetry but ethics. When he adds that it is pitiable to beat a cripple with his own crutches, the little prose pa.s.sage is lifted up into poetry, for we are brought into a state of ecstasy by the imaginative ill.u.s.tration. Similarly take some of the instances of self-sacrifice by the common people which Bret Harte and O.

Henry delighted in depicting. Some of their stories become poetry by emotional presentation of a trite idea.

There must also be more or less sympathy with the poet's viewpoint. "All right human song," says Ruskin in his _Lectures on Art_, "is the finished expression by art, of the joy or grief of n.o.ble persons, for right causes. And accurately in proportion to the rightness of the cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money."

Ruskin may have corrupted our artistic outlook somewhat by insisting on an ethical aim. Yet we should remember that our aesthetic feelings are influenced by our moral outlook. While we should not seek an ethical aim in literature as an end in itself, while we should shun the preacher of commonplaces who poses as a poet, we cannot respond to the sympathetic depicting of an emotion which we ourselves could never feel because of repugnance to it.

To appreciate a poem truly, we must feel as the poet does and sympathize with the motives that inspired his feelings. The reasons that urge him to express his emotions must appear to us just ones. If our intellect is far greater than that of the poet, we shall find that many of the causes that inspire him to sing as he does would not at all arouse in us the emotions experienced by him; his poem is not the greatest art to us. If his intellect is superior to ours, we shall not like his work; but then it will be because he is more advanced than we are.

If a poet were to sing of an incestuous love; or decry sympathy for the distressed; or to laud a cruel action; or to gloat over the schemes of the fraudulent; or sing favorably of any action which we think a base one, his poem would not be art for it does not evoke emotional response from anybody.

Poe laid down the principle of art for art's sake that poetry deals with beauty alone and that the only faculty for appreciating it is that of taste. He held that poetry had nothing to do with truth or duty; that the intellect and the moral sense were concerned with these and hence had no field for exercising themselves either in writing or judging poetry.

As a matter of fact all three faculties, taste, intellect and moral sense, are called into use in creating and appreciating the highest kind of poetry or any other form of literature. There is no reason why a poet should not make use of all three faculties if he has them all developed.

Goethe and Ibsen possessed them. The highest form of taste can scarcely be attained unless the poet's intellect and moral sense are fine. For falsehood and sin are repugnant to our taste for beauty. A book that is absolutely tainted with moral perversities or shows a foolish and inconceivable conception of intellectual values will be certainly deficient in some phases of beauty. Our consciences and our minds are unconsciously consulted in our conception of the beautiful. Not only truth, but duty is beauty. Even Poe maintained that Taste held intimate relations with Intellect and Truth and he therefore placed it between them.

The greatest cla.s.sics are those that appeal to all three faculties in us and those works which offend both our intellect and moral sense do not completely satisfy our sense of beauty. The best critics from Hazlitt to Brandes understood that. Fortunately many of the cla.s.sics have lost only in parts their moral and intellectual value, and hence still hold sway over us. And sometimes the beauty is so intensely striking that we charitably overlook faults of morality and intellect.

As Professor Woodberry says in his _A New Defense of Poetry_ in _The Heart of Man_: "Can there by any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation."

The connection between art and ethics is closer than some critics imagine. Spingarn was mistaken when he said that we have done with all moral judgment of literature. A book is often artistically great chiefly because its ethical viewpoint is right. The rightness of it is often what creates the ecstasy. Let us take Ibsen's _Ghosts_. The real greatness of this play is not chiefly in its picture of heredity or of a man becoming an idiot. Its real value lies in its att.i.tude towards the marriage problem and its contrast of the two characters, Mrs. Alving, the representative of the new order, and of Pastor Manders, representing society. The leading question there is, should Mrs. Alving have gone back to her husband, knowing that he was possessed of a loathsome disease which might be inherited by any possible progeny? Was she justified in leaving him? That these are the important questions is evident from the motive which prompted Ibsen to write the play, namely, to answer the critics of the _Doll's House_. The conclusion reached by Ibsen from the terrible picture is that Mrs. Alving was wrong in going back to her husband, that there are times when it is justifiable to leave one's husband. This is the moral lesson of the play, and is conveyed with great ecstasy; in fact, the moral intensifies the ecstasy.

A conventional playwright would have concluded that Mrs. Alving should have remained with her husband in obedience to duty, that the simple-minded Pastor was in the right. The play even if handled as well as by Ibsen could not have been the great work of literature that it is, if written in defense of the conventional moral code. A great author attacks conventional morality to battle for a higher morality.

The moral ideas of an author have much to do with the literary excellence of his work.[133:A] But this does not mean that we must go back to the old Greek idea that poetry be a vehicle for the inculcation of the commonplace ethics. Nor does it imply that we cannot appreciate a poet because we disapprove of the religion or political party with which he is affiliated.

In the conclusion of his essay on "How a Young Man Should Study Poetry,"

Plutarch shows that the philosopher and the poet are engaged in the same mission. He takes pa.s.sages from the poets and shows us that they are similar to those he selects from the philosophers. The doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras agree with the ideas by the dramatists spoken on the stage, and with those that lyricists sang to the harp. We may accept Plutarch's views except in so far as he urges that poetry should preach dogmatic and conventional ethics.

We also see that parts of Dante, Pope, and Sh.e.l.ley may be placed parallel respectively to pa.s.sages from thinkers who influenced them, Aquinas, Bolingbroke, and G.o.dwin, to learn that the poetry resided in the original philosophic prose pa.s.sage. It was enhanced not by the verse form but by the process of ecstatic re-statement.

Should we say that Cowper and Wordsworth are poets, and that Rousseau, from whom they got many ideas, is not? Is Browning only a poet and no philosopher, and is Carlyle only a philosopher and not a poet? Is the verse of Goethe where pantheism is taught, poetry, and do you find no poetry at all in Spinoza's _Ethics_?

Among the most famous philosophical pa.s.sages of Shakespeare is the one in _The Tempest_ describing the transitoriness of this world and ending with the famous line about our life being rounded with sleep. If there is anything in Shakespeare that is poetry of a high order, this famous pa.s.sage is, and yet it is really philosophy. It is poetry not because it is in blank verse or has rhythm, but because the ideas are stated in an emotional and ecstatic manner. There is poetry in ideas and those critics who shrink from applying the word poetry to intellectual performances are urged to honeycomb their Shakespeare for numerous ideas that are beyond question poetry.

A great idea is poetry; a profound and fa.r.s.eeing idea is poetry, whether written with rhythm or not. If a commonplace thought, rhythmically adorned, may sometimes be poetry, most certainly a profound idea ecstatically but unrhythmically expressed is poetry.

What is the difference between poetry and philosophy? If we examine into the nature of each we will find that there is a line at which they meet and where it is hard to distinguish one from the other. As a rule, the principles of metaphysics, epistemology and logic as written down in the average philosophical work seldom are poetry. Only occasionally have the philosophers waxed ecstatic. Yet many novelists, essayists and verse writers have made many of these philosophical principles poetry by stating them in an ecstatic manner. Any philosophical principle arousing our emotions is poetry.

The general truths of sociology, ethics and psychology form the subject matter of the literature of ecstasy, but they are poetry only when ecstatically treated. The psychological novel and the problem play deal with these truths. Go to some original treatises on sociological, moral or psychological subjects and omit the statistics, the laboratory work and the cold hard reasoning and you will often find great ideas emotionally stated that belong to the literature of ecstasy. We have parted with the idea that an author must be tearing a pa.s.sion to tatters, or telling a story, or uttering a complaint, in order to produce poetry. When Herbert Spencer a.n.a.lyzes love for a page and a half and tells us how it is composed, we exclaim, this is the literature of ecstasy even though we find it in a treatise on psychology. He describes to us how we feel when we love by enumerating to us the different sensations we experience. (_Principles of Psychology_ Vol. 1, Part IV, Ch. 8, Par. 215.) The pa.s.sage may not be pa.s.sionate poetry, but it would not have been out of place in a novel by Stendhal, George Eliot or Meredith.

When Freud reveals our souls to ourselves, when Fabre writes a book on the doings of insects, we often are reading poetry or the literature of ecstasy, when we think we are reading science.

We might select many pa.s.sages from philosophical works that belong to the literature of ecstasy, pa.s.sages from Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume, but more especially from Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. There are isolated paragraphs in their works wherein we find the imagination and the intellect fused; we cannot distinguish that which belongs to the realm of logic and that which is the result of pure emotion. Of philosophers of our own time, Bergson and Bertrand Russel have occasional pa.s.sages where a profound idea is emotionalized. Hence these belong to the literature of ecstasy, or poetry.

We must no longer conclude that only that is poetry which sings a song in verse. It is just because the verse lyric, epic, and tragedy are among the oldest forms of literature that the theories of poetry have been built up by examining chiefly these forms. Aristotle's _Poetics_, except for a few vital pa.s.sages, has done more mischief in literary criticism than his _Logic_ has done in philosophy.

What a queer definition of poetry is that which includes a metrical insipid utterance or a versified fact of microscopic importance, and excludes the sublime reflections of philosophers who contemplate the nature of the entire cosmos, who fathom the mysteries of the universe, and who state for us our relation to it and give us profound conceptions of it. If one finds poetry only in the saccharine sonnets of our magazine writers and none at all in the great philosophers, he does not understand what poetry is. If you, however, call a philosophical principle poetry when you find it in verse, you must admit that the poetry was there before it was put in verse, in the prose version. For poetry, not being a branch of literature but an emotional spirit bathing all literature, also holds philosophical ideas, intellectual conceptions in solution, whenever these are in prose and move to ecstasy.

Aristotle and many others were also absorbed as to the difference between poetry and history, as they had been between poetry and philosophy. He stated truly enough that Homer as a poet did not differ from Herodotus as a historian simply because of their difference in metre. He found that the difference between poetry and history lay in this, that poetry dealt with the universal and history with the particular. This definition means very little to us to-day even though commentators try to explain that Aristotle includes under poetry any treatment also of the particular which presents universal situations and depicts universal traits. History, however, also treats of the universal, for it records universal traits in the particular events which it describes. Aristotle's distinction falls, for history and poetry deal with both the particular and universal. We cannot say with Aristotle that history tells what Alcibiades actually did, while poetry would tell what any man would do. An actual emotional account of the deeds and character of Alcibiades is poetry, as you will observe by reading Plutarch.

For all historical writing may be poetical and contain poems, if the ecstasy is there. What distinguishes the poetry in history is the emotion, and all history that is a dry narrative is history and not poetry. Thucydides's _Peloponnesian War_ and Carlyle's _French Revolution_ contain much poetry though they deal with the particular, but they are made poetry by the ecstasy. Some of Herodotus is poetry, and much of Homer is history.

Again Aristotle's distinction is obsolete in these days of prose fiction which deals with the particular, and often with the actual, and merely changes the names. And these novels often contain poems. We recall Fielding's distinction between novels and histories, the former being true in everything but the names, and the latter being false in everything but the names.

There is poetry in Livy, Tacitus, in Gibbon, Froude, and all great historians.

FOOTNOTES:

[133:A] "Moral nihilism inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism. . . .

The values of literature are in the last resort moral. . . . Literature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty prevails."--J. Middleton Murry.

CHAPTER VIII

POETRY RISES ABOVE ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND INTUITION

The first lengthy formulation of the theory of art for art's sake was made, I believe, by Gautier in the preface to his _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, in 1833. The theory itself had previously also been advanced and put into practice by Keats, and a little later by Poe. Hugo claims to have been the first one to have used the term. He was also one of the most bitter opponents of the idea, as the readers of his _Shakespeare_ will note. The view was supported in France by Baudelaire and Flaubert, and by later schools like the Symbolists. In England Swinburne made an excellent defense of it in his book on _William Blake_. The poets of "The Nineties" like Wilde and Symons wrote in favor of it. Mention should also be made of an exceedingly good chapter on the _Dignity of Technique_ in R. A. M. Stevenson's _Velasquez_, and especially Whistler's _Ten o'Clock Lecture_.

Needless to say, most of these writers had their own conception of what art for art's sake was. They agreed on several phases of it--that the subject matter and ideas of a work of art did not count, that the important thing was the execution, that art was not to be judged by any standard of morality, that it had its own morality, and that it did not matter if from a conventional point of view it was immoral, provided it was well executed. The theory was antagonistic to the introduction of ideas, of humanitarian motives, of tendencies to the portrayal of life and the a.n.a.lysis of emotions. Its use was certainly an undemocratic phase of art.

In many respects the theory awakens sympathy in all lovers of literature; it was a reaction to the moralist view which wanted art to teach the commonplace ethical notions we all know. Art has always had an enemy in the bourgeois moralist. He always looked for a sermon, and stamped the artist as immoral who arrived at conclusions different from those countenanced by the church or the state. He was not satisfied to read of a wonderful portrayal of a pa.s.sion, done as a lesson in psychology without any moral comments by the author. He wanted the artist to act like a preacher and condemn at all times, instead of portray. The Puritan opposed the truthful description of natural emotions; he looked askance upon references to the body; he wanted people drawn in obedience to laws, instead of as breaking through them.

He tried to thrust subjects upon the artist and limit him. He had no ear for sound, no eye for color, no appreciation of beauty.

Little wonder that the artist lost patience and sent morality to the devil, and deified technique and deliberately chose unseemly subjects.

The disciples of art for art's sake did much good to the cause of art.