IV

So far I have spoken chiefly of the content of poetry. In its character

as a sort of music it is plainly a good deal more respectable, and

makes an appeal to a far higher variety of reader, or, at all events,

to a reader in a state of greater mental clarity. A capacity for

music—by which I mean melody, harmony and clang-tint—comes late in

the history of every race. The savage can apprehend rhythm, but he

is quite incapable of carrying a tune in any intelligible scale. The

negro roustabouts of our own South, who are commonly regarded as very

musical, are actually only rhythmical; they never invent melodies,

but only rhythms. And the whites to whom their barbarous dance-tunes

chiefly appeal are in their own stage of culture. When one observes

a room full of well-dressed men and women swaying and wriggling to

the tune of some villainous mazurka from the Mississippi levees, one

may assume very soundly that they are all the sort of folk who play

golf and bridge, and prefer “The Sheik” to “Heart of Darkness” and

believe in the League of Nations. A great deal of superficial culture

is compatible with that pathetic barbarism, and even a high degree of

æsthetic sophistication in other directions. The Greeks who built the

Parthenon knew no more about music than a hog knows of predestination;

they were almost as ignorant in that department as the modern Iowans or

New Yorkers. It was not, indeed, until the Renaissance that music as

we know it appeared in the world, and it was not until less than two

centuries ago that it reached a high development. In Shakespeare’s day

music was just getting upon its legs in England; in Goethe’s day it

was just coming to full flower in Germany; in France and America it is

still in the savage state. It is thus the youngest of the arts, and the

most difficult, and hence the noblest. Any sane young man of twenty-two

can write an acceptable sonnet, or design a habitable house or draw a

horse that will not be mistaken for an automobile, but before he may

write even a bad string quartet he must go through a long and arduous

training, just as he must strive for years before he may write prose

that is instantly recognizable as prose, and not as a string of mere

words.

The virtue of such great poets as Shakespeare does not lie in the

content of their poetry, but in its music. The content of the

Shakespearean plays, in fact, is often puerile, and sometimes quite

incomprehensible. No scornful essays by George Bernard Shaw and Frank

Harris were needed to demonstrate the fact; it lies plainly in the

text. One snickers sourly over the spectacle of generations of pedants

debating the question of Hamlet’s mental processes; the simple fact

is that Shakespeare gave him no more mental processes than a Fifth

avenue rector has, but merely employed him as a convenient spout

for some of the finest music ever got into words. Assume that he

has all the hellish sagacity of a Nietzsche, and that music remains

unchanged; assume that he is as idiotic as a Grand Worthy Flubdub of

the Freemasons, and it still remains unchanged. As it is intoned on

the stage by actors, the poetry of Shakespeare commonly loses content

altogether. One cannot make out what the _cabotin_ is saying; one can

only observe that it is beautiful. There are whole speeches in the

Shakespearean plays whose meaning is unknown ever to scholars—and yet

they remain favorites, and well deserve to. Who knows, again, what

the sonnets are about? Is the bard talking about the inn-keeper’s

wife at Oxford, or about a love affair of a pathological, Y. M. C.

A. character? Some say one thing, and some say the other. But all

who have ears must agree that the sonnets are extremely beautiful

stuff—that the English language reaches in them, the topmost heights

of conceivable beauty. Shakespeare thus ought to be ranked among

the musicians, along with Beethoven. As a philosopher he was a

ninth-rater—but so was old Ludwig. I wonder what he would have done

with prose? I can’t make up my mind about it. One day I believe that he

would have written prose as good as Dryden’s, and the next day I begin

to fear that he would have produced something as bad as Swinburne’s. He

had the ear, but he lacked the logical sense. Poetry has done enough

when it charms, but prose must also convince.

I do not forget, of course, that there is a borderland in which it

is hard to say, of this or that composition, whether it is prose or

poetry. Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech is commonly reckoned as prose, and

yet I am convinced that it is quite as much poetry as the Queen Mab

speech or Marlowe’s mighty elegy on Helen of Troy. More, it is so read

and admired by the great masses of the American people. It is an almost

perfect specimen of a comforting but unsound asseveration put into

rippling and hypnotizing words; done into plain English, the statements

of fact in it would make even a writer of school history-books laugh.

So with parts of the Declaration of Independence. No one believes

seriously that they are true, but nearly everyone agrees that it

would be a nice thing if they _were_ true—and meanwhile Jefferson’s

eighteenth century rhetoric, by Johnson out of John Lyly’s “Euphues,”

completes the enchantment. In the main, the test is to be found in the

audience rather than in the poet. If it is naturally intelligent and in

a sober and critical mood, demanding sense and proofs, then nearly all

poetry becomes prose; if, on the contrary, it is congenitally maudlin,

or has a few drinks aboard, or is in love, or is otherwise in a soft

and believing mood, then even the worst of prose, if it has a touch

of soothing sing-song in it, becomes moving poetry—for example, the

diplomatic and political gospel-hymns of the late Dr. Wilson, a man

constitutionally unable to reason clearly or honestly, but nevertheless

one full of the burbling that caresses the ears of simple men. Most of

his speeches, during the days of his divine appointment, translated

into intelligible English, would have sounded as idiotic as a prose

version of “The Blessed Damozel.” Read by his opponents, they sounded

so without the translation.

But at the extremes, of course, there are indubitable poetry and

incurable prose, and the difference is not hard to distinguish.

Prose is simply a form of writing in which the author intends that

his statements shall be accepted as conceivably true, even when they

are about imaginary persons and events; its appeal is to the fully

conscious and alertly reasoning man. Poetry is a form of writing in

which the author attempts to disarm reason and evoke emotion, partly by

presenting images that awaken a powerful response in the subconscious

and partly by the mere sough and blubber of words. Poetry is not

distinguished from prose, as Prof. Dr. Lowes says in his “Convention

and Revolt in Poetry,” by an exclusive phraseology, but by a peculiar

attitude of mind—an attitude of self-delusion, of fact-denying, of

saying what isn’t true. It is essentially an effort to elude the bitter

facts of life, whereas prose is essentially a means of unearthing and

exhibiting them. The gap is bridged by sentimental prose, which is half

prose and half poetry—Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, the average sermon,

the prose of an erotic novelette. Immediately the thing acquires a

literal meaning it ceases to be poetry; immediately it becomes capable

of convincing an adult and perfectly sober man during the hours between

breakfast and luncheon it is indisputably prose.

This quality of untruthfulness pervades all poetry, good and bad.

You will find it in the very best poetry that the world has so far

produced, to wit, in the sonorous poems of the Jewish Scriptures.

The ancient Jews were stupendous poets. Moreover, they were shrewd

psychologists, and so knew the capacity of poetry, given the believing

mind, to convince and enchant—in other words, its capacity to drug

the auditor in such a manner that he accepts it literally, as he

might accept the baldest prose. This danger in poetry, given auditors

impressionable enough, is too little estimated and understood. It is

largely responsible for the persistence of sentimentality in a world

apparently designed for the one purpose of manufacturing cynics. It is

probably chiefly responsible for the survival of Christianity, despite

the hard competition that it has met with from other religions. The

theology of Christianity—_i._ e., its prose—is certainly no more

convincing than that of half a dozen other religions that might be

named; it is, in fact, a great deal less convincing than the theology

of, say, Buddhism. But the poetry of Christianity is infinitely more

lush and beautiful than that of any other religion ever heard of.

There is more lovely poetry in one of the Psalms than in all of the

Non-Christian scriptures of the world taken together. More, this

poetry is in both Testaments, the New as well as the Old. Who could

imagine a more charming poem than that of the Child in the manger?

It has enchanted the world for nearly two thousand years. It is

simple, exquisite and overwhelming. Its power to arouse emotion is

so great that even in our age it is at the bottom of fully a half of

the kindliness, romanticism and humane sentimentality that survive in

Christendom. It is worth a million syllogisms.

Once, after plowing through sixty or seventy volumes of bad verse, I

described myself as a poetry-hater. The epithet was and is absurd. The

truth is that I enjoy poetry as much as the next man—when the mood

is on me. But what mood? The mood, in a few words, of intellectual

and spiritual fatigue, the mood of revolt against the insoluble

riddle of existence, the mood of disgust and despair. Poetry, then,

is a capital medicine. First its sweet music lulls, and then its

artful presentation of the beautifully improbable soothes and gives

surcease. It is an escape from life, like religion, like enthusiasm,

like glimpsing a pretty girl. And to the mere sensuous joy in it, to

the mere low delight in getting away from the world for a bit, there

is added, if the poetry be good, something vastly better, something

reaching out into the realm of the intelligent, to wit, appreciation

of good workmanship. A sound sonnet is almost as pleasing an object

as a well-written fugue. A pretty lyric, deftly done, has all the

technical charm of a fine carving. I think it is craftsmanship that

I admire most in the world. Brahms enchants me because he knew

his trade perfectly. I like Richard Strauss because he is full of

technical ingenuities, because he is a master-workman. Well, who ever

heard of a finer craftsman than William Shakespeare? His music was

magnificent, he played superbly upon all the common emotions—and he

did it magnificently, he did it with an air. No, I am no poetry-hater.

But even Shakespeare I most enjoy, not on brisk mornings when I feel

fit for any deviltry, but on dreary evenings when my old wounds are

troubling me, and some fickle one has just sent back the autographed

set of my first editions, and bills are piled up on my desk, and I am

too sad to work. Then I mix a stiff dram—and read poetry.