THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF THE POETRY OF ART
Nobody will deny that the modern man does more thinking and less singing
than the man, say, of Shakspere’s time; and nobody will deny that
thinking needs solitude, while singing—real, hearty singing—asks the
throng and a refrain. Thought, M. Anatole France[296] declares in his
vivacious way, “thought is the acid which dissolves the universe, and if
all men fell to thinking at once, the world would cease to be.” “Lonely
thinking,” says Nietzsche, “that is wise; lonely singing,—stupid.” In
the same fashion, a solitary habit of thinking has made itself master of
poetry, particularly of the lyric; while the singing of a poem is going
fast out of date. Poetry begins with the impersonal, with communal
emotion, and passes to a personal note of thought so acutely individual
that it has to disguise itself, wear masks, and prate about being
objective. For objective and even simple poetry may be highly subjective
at heart; and to define subjective as talking about one’s self, what
Bagehot, in his essay on Hartley Coleridge, calls self-delineation, is
by no means a sufficient account of the trait. When the folksong runs:—
A Nant’s, à Nant’s est arrivé,
_Saute, blonde, et lève le pied_,
Trois beaux navir’s chargés de blé;
_Saute, blonde, ma joli’ blonde_....
and Béranger sings:—
Une plainte touchante
De ma bouche sortit;
Le bon Dieu me dit, Chante,
Chante, pauvre petit!
it is not only wrong to take simplicity as the differencing factor of
the communal song, for Béranger is quite as simple, but it will not do
to fall back on mere self-delineation as end of the matter in art. Half
of the folksongs of Europe are self-delineations of the singing and
dancing crowd, in mass or by deputed “I.” The real difference lies in
the shifting of the point of view; song, once the consolation and
expression of the festal crowd, comes to be the consolation and
expression of the solitary poet. “I do not inquire,” Ribot remarks,[297]
“whether this sort of isolation in an ivory tower is a gain or a loss
for poetry; but I observe its growing frequency as civilization
advances, the complete antithesis to its collective character in the
earliest ages.” To study such a change in the long reaches of poetic
progress would be an almost impossible task even if the material were at
hand; it is best to take a comparatively short range of time and a
definite place,—say the literature of modern Europe from its beginning
in the Middle Ages down to the present time. The extremes are fairly
sundered. Europe had lapsed from civilization to a half barbarous state,
from the height of the Roman empire to the depth of the dark ages, with
a corresponding decline of intellectual power and a great inrush of
communal force. Out of these communal conditions, individual and
intellectual vigour made its difficult way; how difficult, how tortuous
that way, every one knows; and it is along this route, and about the
time of the renaissance, that one may best watch the differencing
elements of artistic and individual poetry as they come slowly into
view.
As the individual[298] frees himself from the clogs of his mediæval
guild, in literature as in life, there begins the distinctly modern idea
of fame, of glory, as a personal achievement apart from community or
state; and there, too, begins the idea of literary property. Fame of the
poet had its classical tradition, and was asserted in a conventional,
meaningless way by mediæval poets, chiefly in Latin; but the market
value of a poem is something new.[299] From this time on there is a
pathetic struggle in the poet’s mind whether he shall regard his poem as
offspring to cherish or as ware to sell. Randolph, writing to his
friend, Master Anthony Stafford, takes the nobler view:—
Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone ...
If I a poem leave, that poem is my son.
There is pretty antithesis, too, between the director and the poet in
Goethe’s play before the play in _Faust_,—one for his box-receipts, and
the other for the solitudes of poetry and the gods. A happy solution has
been found of late for this dilemma; over the naked contradiction of
love and merchandise one throws the cloak of the artist. The artist
begets in pure love of his art; and he sells for Falstaff’s reason,—it
is his vocation. Until poetry got this market value, however, it was
common goods; poets had written generically, as members of a class or
guild,[300] and any member might use the common stock of expressions and
ideas. A translator was as great as his original.[301] The eighth
chapter of Dante’s essay on composition in the vernacular opens with a
curious discourse about artistic property, as if the new idea and the
new phrase needed a gloss. “When we say, ‘this is Peter’s _canzone_,’ we
mean that Peter made it, not merely that he uttered it!” Such an
explanation, however, seems timely enough if one remembers that “a
mediæval writer held it to be improper to join his name to any literary
composition,”[302] and that Dante, “first of the moderns” as he is, and
personal as his work seems to be, actually names himself but once in the
whole _Commedia_. Here is the dying struggle of that clan ownership[303]
which had ruled from the days of the primitive horde; for it is clear
that intellectual property would be the last kind to be developed, and
even if the poet liked to see his name graven on the colder side of the
rock, this was not an isolated, personal distinction, but was merged in
the register of the guild like the names on a soldiers’ monument.
Horace’s “write me down among the lyric poets” was an intelligible
ambition to mediæval minds; but the purely personal triumph of his _non
omnis móriar_ and its splendid context was alien to their way of
thought. Barring the degree of genius in each, one may say that Dante
and Victor Hugo were equally strong in their intense individuality; here
is a case where Gautier’s phrase holds good that the brain of an artist
was the same under the Pharaohs as it is now; yet that conditions change
the product, that the individual note, piercing in the modern, becomes
almost communal and generic in the older poet, that a distinct curve of
evolution to the personal extreme, even in artistic poetry, can be drawn
between them, is clear to probation for any one who will compare two
famous passages which a hasty inference would probably declare to be on
the same straight individual line. If one looks at the whole passage
where Dante speaks of his poetic achievement,[304] and if one neither
isolates a phrase nor yet sentimentalizes it all to suit modern ideas;
if one notes the satisfaction which the poet feels with his work in and
for the guild, and how he passes the time of day with a brother
craftsman; then one will find in it not only a touch of artlessness, of
what is called, rightly or wrongly, the mediæval, the communal, but an
effacement of personality in the very act of asserting it. He shows, as
it were, his diploma from the guild of poets. To bring this artlessness
into clear relief, one has only to compare the thirty-second of Hugo’s
_Chants du Crépuscule_, where the poet, alone in an old tower, addresses
the bell which hangs there, its pious inscription insulted by the
obscenities, blasphemies, and futilities written over it; he is no
exile, this poet, but proudly and contemptuously isolated from his kind,
whose brutishness he has just deplored; and he speaks thus to the
bell,—of all survivals the most characteristic of mediæval thought, the
veriest symbol of communal religious life:—
Sens-tu, par cette instinct vague et plein de douceur,
Qui révèle toujours une sœur à la sœur,
Qu’à cette heure où s’endort la soirée expirante,[305]
_Une âme est près de toi, non moins que toi vibrante_,
Qui bien souvent aussi jette un bruit solennel,
Et se plaint dans l’amour comme toi dans le ciel?
Then the superb lines of comparison: life has written on the poet’s soul
base and irreverent inscriptions, like those on the bell; but a touch of
the divine, a message, and like the bell, so his soul breaks out into
harmonies in which even the audacities and futilities perforce take
part. Compare all this introspection, this immense assumption of
individual importance, with the objective, communal tone of Dante,
despite that “I am one who sings whenever love inspires me,”—so like
Hugo’s assertion, and yet so different. In each of these passages one
can see artistic individuality; but between them stretches a long chain
of development in which each link is a new emphasis on the individual in
art. One of the earliest and strongest of these links was forged by the
renaissance; although it must be borne in mind that Dante represents not
simply his guild of singers, but behind them a singing community of
peasants, the songs of field, spinning-room, and village dance, still
dominant among unlettered folk and not yet shamed into silence by print
and the schoolmaster.
The change, however, was there; the tide had turned against communal
sentiment, and individuals were feeling a new power. Not only fame and
glory fled from the guild to the great man; individual disgrace, the
lapse, the shortcoming, find a record. Once the flyting was carried out
before the folk, rose and fell with the occasion, and was a thing of
festal origin, like the Eskimo poem-duel, or the earliest amœbean verse,
or the German _schnaderhüpfl_; but Aretino now appears as the father of
journalism in our pleasant modern sense, as the arch reporter, the
discoverer and publisher of personal scandal.[306] In painting, too, one
notes the sudden rage for portraits; and it is the portrait of the
individual for himself, not simply of pope, or of abbot, or of prince,
as the head and type of a corporation, although a trace of this
influence lingers in the setting of the picture, witness one of
Holbein’s merchants, with his bills, pens, memoranda, and a dozen
mercantile suggestions scattered about him. Poetry, of course, felt the
change first of all, both in subject-matter and in form. For the latter,
there is the founding of the sonnet, that apartment for a single
gentleman in verse. One thinks at once of Petrarch, rightly called “the
first modern man,” and deserving the title better than Dante, who was
quite as mediæval as he was modern,[307] while Petrarch belonged to the
new world; besides his sonnets, his correspondence and his confessions
show that he not only felt the need, as none of his predecessors had
felt it, to reveal and analyze his personality, but also recognized an
interest on the part of the public to which these revelations could
respond. The mediæval poet sought his public, did not call the public to
himself; and the artistic form of his poetry is the utterance of common
feeling in a common and often conventional phrase. The May morning, the
vision,[308] the garden and the roses and the blindingly beautiful young
person, the allegorical birds and beasts,—this was the late mediæval
tether; although allegory helped the poet to escape the throng and hedge
his personality with some importance, even allegory is in the service if
not of the throng, at least of the guild. Allegory as a poetical form
mediates between the old communal ballad, or the _chanson de geste_, and
the new lyric of confidences. The modern poet cut loose from it all, and
cast about for the gentle reader, soon to be his portion by the happy
intervention of print. Ronsard strikes this note of separation from an
unappreciative throng, and so does many another humanist; while
Chaucer’s contempt for the masses is not so much artistic as mediæval
and aristocratic. Dunbar, our first really modern poet, the first to
take that purely individual attitude, was also first of our poets to see
his work in printer’s ink. Even when the form of literature demanded
objective treatment, the interest began to be individual. We now laud
our poet or playwright for the fine individuality of his folk, and flout
those masterless tales, songs, ballads, where even the hero is a mere
type, or, worse, a mere doer of deeds. This doer of deeds answered the
desire for poetic expression at a time when an individual was merged in
his clan; the excess of interest in action is proportioned to the excess
of communal over individual importance. As the artist develops, as he
begins to feel his way toward individualism, his genius is spent first
upon allegory, and then, as real life grows more imperious, upon the
type, a compromise between individual and community. Here stands
Chaucer. Like Dante he looks both ways; his squire, for example,
deliciously clear and individual as he seems, has as much reminiscence
of Childe Waters as prophecy of Romeo. It is characteristic of the two
periods in which Chaucer and Shakspere respectively worked, that while
one named his masterpiece, the study of a vulgar woman, “a wife of
Bath,” the other called a like masterpiece “Mrs. Quickly of
Eastcheap,”—a very pretty little curve of evolution in itself; and when
the portrait of the merchant is drawn,—and what a portrait!—that
careless “sooth to sayn, I noot how men hym calle,” as compared with
Shakspere’s treatment of Antonio, is suggestive not only of the
aristocrat, but also of the mediæval point of view. Even the setting of
the Prologue is in point,—these pilgrims, each a representative of his
class or corporation, their common lodging, their association, even if
temporary, as in a guild, their jests, courtesies, and quarrels, all in
the open air. A century later, people had come indoors. Professor
Patten,[309] alert to note the connection between æsthetic change and a
change in economic conditions, points out the alteration thus wrought in
the passage from communal to individual life. Window-glass, the chimney,
bricks, all improvements of the home, changed this home from a prison to
a palace, from something shunned and undesired to the focal point of
happiness. Outdoor communal amusements yielded to indoor pleasures
shared by a few. The dances and the license of May-day, uproarious and
often questionable rejoicings once common to all, were now left to the
baser sort, while quiet, reputable folk turned to their homes. Knight
and prioress, too, no longer rode beside the miller and put up with his
_gros rire_, his drunken antics, and his tale.
The main expression in poetry brought about by that new power of the
individual is the confidential note, the assumption of a reader’s
interest in the poet’s experience, what J. A. Symonds called “the lyric
cry,” begetting on the part of this reader or hearer a sense at first
confined to such mutual relations of the poet and the sympathetic soul
to which he spoke, but spreading little by little until it is now fairly
to be called the medium, the atmosphere, of poetry at large; one names
it sentiment. The history of modern verse, with epic and drama in decay,
is mainly the history of lyrical sentiment. Where does this first appear
in European poetry?[310] Answers to such a question are made with
melancholy forebodings, seeing that a first appearance in literary
annals is as unstable as the positively last appearance of a favourite
singer; but French criticism has pitched, with considerable show of
right, upon that amiable vagabond, Villon. Certainly the _Grand
Testament_ is as familiar in its tone to the modern reader as it is
difficult and obsolete in its speech; and Sainte-Beuve, in a pretty bit
of criticism, has undertaken to show why Villon’s most famous ballade
touches this modern sense, while verses seemingly like it are scorned as
monkish prattle.[311] Throughout the Middle Ages a favourite form of
communal sentiment, or rather of theological and professional
reflection, was to ask where this and that famous person might now be
found. The mediæval poet could string together interminable rimed
queries like these of St. Bernard:—
Dic ubi Salomon, olim tam nobilis?
Vel ubi Samson est, dux invincibilis?
Vel pulcher Absolon, vultu mirabilis?
Vel dulcis Jonathas, multum amabilis?
and so on, with pagans like Cæsar, Tully, Aristotle. A capable Frenchman
traced this sort of poem far back, and on his heels came a tireless, not
to say superfluous, German;[312] but it was Sainte-Beuve who did the one
important thing. He sees in Villon’s queries about those fair ladies
dead and gone little more than the old conventional question, and finds
Villon’s originality in the exquisite refrain, with its light,
half-mocking pathos: _But where are the snows of yester year?_ The Latin
simply failed to add:—
Ast ubi nix vetus, tam effusibilis?
Yet Sainte-Beuve did not quite touch the quick. Even this refrain is no
more original than the queries; for it not only echoes a popular phrase,
and perhaps is itself nothing more than a communal refrain,[313] but it
continues a theme of the mediæval poet even better known than the _ubi
sunt_. The real change is not in words or phrase, but in a shifting from
the professional to the personal point of view. The poet of the sacred
guild could put this fact of mortality either as a question or as an
“example,”—witness a thirteenth-century poem,[314] where the prospect of
dissolution is fortified by the roasting of St. Lawrence, the beheading
of John the Baptist, and the stabbing of Thomas à Becket; while the same
manuscript which holds this “example” has a charming little poem of
questions, the _Luve Ron_ of Thomas de Hales, often quoted as forerunner
of Villon’s ballade. “A maid of Christ,”—and we note this touch of the
guild,—“asks me to make her a love-song. I will do it. But the love of
this world is a cheat; lovers must die, and men fade all as leaf from
bough. Lovers, quotha? _Where, indeed, are Paris and Helen; where
Tristram, Ysolde, and the rest; where, too, are Hector and Cæsar?_ As if
they had never lived at all!” At first sight this lyric of the guild
seems a counterpart to the pagan cry of Villon, as if the latter were a
parody of the old formula without the piety and with a vague touch of
genius in the refrain; but the difference is more than this. Villon
transfers sentiment from the guild to the individual.[315] It is a
supreme and triumphant and epoch-making attempt to do what the
individual poet had always essayed to do and found impossible,—to leap
communal barriers entirely, and tear himself free from the guild. The
monk could not doff his cowl; his face is hidden; his song asks the
organ, the choir, the general confession, the litany, for a background,
even when it seems fairly Wordsworthian:—
Winter wakens all my care!
Now these trees are waxing bare,
Oft I sigh and mourn full “sair,”
When it cometh in my thought
Of this earthly joy, how it all goeth to naught.[316]
Not so with Villon. He knows no guild, save that of the jolly beggars;
and he can do with ease what even Ronsard does only with difficulty, and
leaning on a classical staff:—
Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n’ira pas,—
paraphrase of Horace. But these ladies pass in line before Villon for
his own whim;[317] they are there to throw a more intense light upon his
own personality; and the cry of the refrain, subtle but absolute touch
of individual sentiment, is the new lyric cry.[318] Across the channel
this cry is echoed in what at first hearing sounds like the veriest poem
of a guild, Dunbar’s _Lament for the Poets_,[319] and in its refrain,
superficially so mediæval, _Timor mortis conturbat me_! But for English
lyric, Dunbar is the first poet of sentiment, in its modern meaning, as
Villon is for the French. In brief, the more one studies these changes,
which could be detailed to the limits of a book, the clearer one sees
that Europe learned from Villon, Dunbar, and their fellows, to take
sentiment[320] instead of the old morality, and to regard lyric verse as
the bidding to a private view of the poet’s mind. The poet now makes
himself the central point of all that he says and sees; he lays all
history, all romance, under tribute to support the burden of his own
fate and frame his proper picture; he is the sun of the system; he
serves no clan or guild, and admits his readers only one by one to an
audience. The advance from Villon’s time is chiefly to add the
intellectual to the individual, an obvious process. Emotion has come so
thoroughly under individual control that the art is now conscious and
the artist supreme, and so thoroughly under intellectual control that
the feelings, however common and widely human their appeal, must own the
mastery of thought. The one involves the other; for consent of emotions
is a far easier affair than consent of opinions and agreement of
reasoning. Emotion is the solvent of early superstition, traditional
beliefs and affections, in a community, as it is in an individual. “I
felt,” says Rousseau, “before I thought; it is the common lot of
humanity.”[321] In societies custom is a consent of instincts, an
unconscious law; legislation, definite and conscious, is a consent of
thinking individuals. A creed has always been easy to change, for it is
matter of thought; a cult, a form, a superstition, communal instincts,
in a word, go not out even with prayer and fasting.
Objections against all this have little weight. One is told that the
renaissance brought uniformity and not diversity of poetic form and
thought. But that rationalism, so called, which then came in, and which
made reason superior to emotion, worked for the individual and not, as
critics say, for the social forces in art.[322] It is true that all this
rational activity, this intelligent study and discussion of the
classics, led to a certain uniformity in poetic work; but every advance
in rationalism really accents the individuality, the artistry, the
intellectual power of the poet, and leads him further from the communal
and instinctive emotional level. Keen emotion brings men closer; keen
thinking separates their paths, even if it leads them to one
destination. Communal emotion is still the mine whence a poet gets his
gold; but where the gold was once current in mere bulk, or at best in
weight, it must now be stamped with the sharpest possible impression of
artistic thought. Or, again, one may be more precise in one’s objection.
Attacking this idea that emotion, or the mass, rules in one age, and the
individual, or thought, in another, as something akin to Comte’s
discredited evolutionary drama in three great acts,—feeling, fancy,
reason,—one may insist on the piercing emotional individualism and
subtle thinking of the church at a time when the communal note is
assumed as dominant in mediæval life. Here again we must protest against
the tyranny of terms. What does Haym mean by the individualism of the
Middle Ages, and precisely what was this individualism of the church?
According as one looks at the church, one may say that it was individual
or that it was communal in its influence. There are really three
elements in the case. The people of the Middle Ages in Europe were to a
great extent organized in a communal system, for the unlettered
community kept many features of the clan, not to say of the horde, and
social growth itself was a matter of the guild. In such relations the
individual had little to say; and it was out of these conditions that
the renaissance, working first through the Italian commonwealths, began
to draw the individual into his new career. Here, then, was the communal
life of the Middle Ages. The second element in the case is the church as
a huge guild, organized for the communal life out of which it grew, and
subordinating individual thought, emotion, will, to the thought,
emotion, and will of this whole body. These two elements, long in
undisputed power, slowly yielded to a third. Within the church itself,
and at first unable to exist outside of it, lay this intellectualized
and individualized emotion which in later times found the church to be
its implacable foe; whether the Hebrew psalms be congregational or
personal,[323] it is certain that the monk in his cell felt them to be
intensely individual, and in the hymns which he wrote, largely by
inspiration of these psalms, one finds much of that spirit which fills a
modern lyric. A hymn has two meanings for the Christian. One is its
communal meaning, as the Scottish kirk could prove; and probably no one
but a Scot, with “the graves of the martyrs” in mind, can fully
appreciate this meaning of a congregational hymn. But to most people a
hymn has the individual note of _Jesus, Lover of my Soul_; this is the
note of early Christian hymns, and is due to a protest against communal
conditions[324] made by that spirit of Christianity which has been its
chief force in modern times, that certification of value given to the
humblest single life, that lifting of the chattel serf into a soul; a
spirit which began and fought the long battle against tradition of race
and clan and guild. De Vigny, in his exquisite _Journal of a Poet_,[325]
points out the importance of the confessional in literary growth, and
derives from this source the “romance of analysis,” with its
exaggeration of the value of a single soul. This new accent upon the
individual, due to the spirit of a new faith, was strengthened in the
Middle Ages by what one understood of the spirit of classic poets; and
when the two forces had worked into the heart of mediæval life, mediæval
life ceased to be; modern life stood in its place, modern art, letters,
statecraft even, all inspired by the individual principle.[326] Now the
mistake made by men who talk of the individualism of the Middle Ages is
that they confuse this germ of intense personal emotion, mainly confined
to the cell of the mediæval monk, with the conditions of mediæval life
at large, conditions, by the way, which had little record in documents.
One forgets that the records, mainly made by studious monks, would give
an exaggerated importance to this personal element, this inner life, and
would ignore to a great extent the life without. Müllenhoff did well to
insist that the Middle Ages neither spoke the speech nor wore the garb
of a monkish chronicle,—still less, it may be added, of a monkish hymn.
With Christianity emphasizing the value of a single soul, with the
emancipation of the individual from state, guild, church, and with the
secularization of letters and art, this habit of referring wide issues
of life to the narrow fortunes of an individual made itself master of
poetry. The emotion of a clan yielded to the emotion of a single soul. A
progress of this sort is seen in _Sir Patrick Spens_, _Macbeth_, and
Matthew Arnold’s _Dover Beach_. Chronology in its higher form makes the
ballad a mediæval and communal affair, the play a thing of art. Each
deals with a Scot as centre of tragedy. In the ballad not a syllable
diverts one from a group made up of the sailor, his comrades, and their
kin. The men put to sea and are drowned; the ladies who will sit vainly
waiting, the wives who will stand “lang, lang, wi’ their gold kaims in
their hair,” give one in belated, unconscious, and imperfect form a
survival of the old clan sorrow, a coronach in gloss. The men are dead,
the women wail, and that is all. But Macbeth, as the crisis draws near,
bewails along with his own case the general lot of man;[327] “der
Menschheit ganzer Jammer fasst ihn an.” Finally, in _Dover Beach_,
modern subjectivity wails and cries out on fate from no stress of
misfortune, but quite _à propos de bottes_ and on general principles.
Subtract now the changes due to epic, dramatic, lyric form; the progress
and the curve are there. The constancy of human nature, yes; but there
are two worlds in which this constant human nature finds varying
expressions: one is the mediæval, where St. Francis can say “laudato sia
Dio mio signore con tutte le creature, _specialmente messer lo frate
sole_” ... and so on, with his joy in nature; and one is the modern,
where Wordsworth must strike that other note, _my heart leaps up_, or
whatever else. Here, indeed, are two distinct worlds, even if it is the
same human heart.
So, too, what one calls objective in modern poetry is not objective in
the communal, mediæval sense; and what one thinks to be sentimental or
even subjective in the ballads or other communal song is not subjective
or sentimental in any modern way. A throng in those homogeneous
conditions was unsentimental in its poetical expression for the good
reason that a throng has emotions distinct from the emotions of an
individual; this, too, is why sentiment and individualism have kept step
in the progress of poetry. Tennyson is objective enough in his verses
about the widow of a slain warrior and her rescuing tears when her child
is brought to her. But this is not really objective, not communal; it is
sentiment, of a high order to be sure, but sentiment. What a different
point of view in the commonplace of the ballads! Was the head of the
house slain and the widow left lamenting, invariably,—
Up spake the son on the nourice’s knee,
“Gin I live to be a man, revenged I’ll be;”
that is true communal and objective emotion. Scott, who was saturated
with ballads and ballad lore, was the last of English poets who could
write in an impersonal and communal way. After him always, as mostly
before him, the subjective and sentimental note came canting in even
where severest objectivity is supposed to reign. If one wishes to feel
this in Scott,—for it is a thing to feel and not to prove by
syllogisms,—one has only to read the final stanza of _Bonnie Dundee_;
not great verse, indeed, but full of a certain unforced simplicity, a
large air, a communal vigour, an echo of unpremeditated, impersonal,
roundly objective song.[328]
There is another process in the poetry of art which serves to disguise
the real tendency toward individual instead of communal emotion.
Communal poetry had a wide, free, outdoor life; the modern poet is
bounded in a nutshell,—but he has his dreams. With intense subjectivity
comes the need to cover a vast range of space and time; in place of the
clan or the community, its grief and joy, set forth by the communal
song, one finds a solitary poet, a sort of sick king in Bokhara, dealing
with the universe, and putting into his lines that quality which is best
expressed in general by the often abused name of _weltschmerz_, and in
particular by those countless passages in modern lyric like the poem
which Shelley wrote “in dejection,” or that verse of Keats which
expresses so admirably the modern lyric attitude in contrast with a
singing and dancing throng:—
On the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone and think.
For this lyric daring, this voyaging through strange seas of thought
alone, this blending of personal reflection with the whole range of
human thought and human emotion, makes poetry cosmic, but does not make
it communal or even objective. The sudden interest in savages, and the
glorification of primitive virtues, even the reasoning against reason
and the emotion for emotion, are part of the subjective process.
Jean-Jacques, Ossian, the _bésoin de réverie_, cosmopolitan sentiment
and sensibility set in vogue by Sterne,[329]—all these details of the
romantic movement need no emphasis; but it is significant that this
subjective search for the objective brought genuine communal poetry into
view, and it is by no means to the glory of the critic that he so often
puts romantic zeal and poetry of the people upon the same plane of
origins. The scientific triumphs of a century and more have added
external nature to the poet’s province; they have put a new sympathy for
natural things along with zeal for humanity and that sense of the
individual and the artist which were due to the renaissance, justifying
to the full Bacon’s definition of art as _homo additus naturae_. Poetry
now means the emotional mood of a thinker alone with his world; we
forget that it ever meant anything else.
The subjective and the sentimental in such excess must each beget a
reaction; they roll back upon themselves, and the shock has two results,
which the critic is tempted at first sight to call objective. One is the
sharp dramatic study, where the poet puts himself into the place of
another person. The second is that great reaction of sentiment which is
called humour. As for the dramatic element, there is no question that a
would-be communal reaction, “the need of a world of men,” follows
naturally upon excess of the subjective note. But the communal reaction
cannot restore communal conditions. The _we_ of throng poetry has
yielded little by little to the lyrical _I-and-Thou_, and finally to the
_I_, pure and simple. An obvious reaction is to put the _I_ into the
personality of another. This device, now so common, began in the early
renaissance by the identification of the poet, not with another person,
but with another class of persons. Burckhardt notes the _Canzone
Zingaresca_ of Lorenzo as “one of the earliest products of the purely
modern impulse to put one’s self, in a poetic and conscious manner, into
the situation of a given class of people.”[330] The “objectivity” of
later poets runs into this mould; it is a conscious process, however
well done, and is quite different from the lack of all subjective
interest which marks early song. One is reminded of the splendid efforts
of Horace to bring back the courage and simplicity and austerity of old
Roman life to the Rome of Augustus. Nietzsche may bid us build our
cities on Vesuvius, and Stevenson may revive that old love for “the
bright eyes of danger”; but it is not the old lover that the Scot
revives, and the _silva antiqua_ is of modern planting. The transfer of
persons brings one no nearer to communal objectivity; it is a reaction
against individual sentiment, which only throws into stronger relief the
prevailing tone of a poetry overwhelmingly lyric, individual, and
sentimental.
Again, growing out of the same change of heart from the communal to the
personal and artistic, is that essentially modern quality of humour,
which really springs from an intensely subjective, not to say
introspective, state; it is sentiment in disguise. One of the surest
tests of communal poetry is the lack of conscious sentiment and of
conscious humour. When we say that a ballad is pathetic, either the
pathos and sentiment are in solution with the material of the ballad, or
else we read them into the ballad outright.[331] So, or nearly so, with
the humour. Communal humour is cruel; as religion, now a matter of love,
began with abject fear, laughter, so unkind scientific folk assert,
began as exultation over the torture of a conquered foe, just as
children are often amused at the suffering of man and beast, until they
take the cue of pity from their elders. Fielding, in his reaction
against overdone sentiment, also went back to the communal idea of
humour. Parson Adams is cudgelled and abused within an inch of his life,
and in _Tom Jones_ bloody heads and broken bones make for merriment on
all occasions. The squire of the picaresque novel,—Lazarillo de Tormes
for an early case, or for a late and trivial example of tremendous
adventures of this sort, Trufaldin in Pigault-Lebrun’s _Folie
Espagnole_—like the poor hero of Cervantes, even like Mr. Pickwick, like
all the breed, may look to bear unmerciful beatings by way of
contributing to the fun. In the later ballads of Robin Hood, tinkers and
beggars trounce the hero again and again; and it is a concession to the
yokel’s point of view when the subtle humour of Falstaff in _Henry IV_
yields to those indignities of pinchings and the buck-basket at which
modern readers boggle in the _Merry Wives_. Burckhardt again lays under
obligation the historian of literature in general, and the champion of
this antithesis in particular, when he points out[332] the clannish and
communal note of what in the Middle Ages passed for humour. It was a
thing not of individuals but of classes, guilds, cities, towns,
villages,[333] countries,—collective altogether. Jests at Scotchmen or
at our own Jerseymen, and the exchange of civilities between rival
colleges, are jaded survivals of this honest but obvious merriment.
Scholars, chiefly Teutonic by birth,[334] have a way of praising this
sort of thing as sound, old, wholesome fun, _derber humor_; but it is an
acquired scholastic taste, and, as a rule, one does not lay down his
Uncle Toby to listen to mediæval banter. If modern humour is an antidote
against modern sentiment, both come from the same source, and _similia
similibus_ was never more true than here; sentiment is individualized
emotion in excess, and humour is the recoil. Walpole had this in mind
when he said that life is a tragedy to one who feels, but a comedy to
one who thinks. The humour which springs from excessive thought, from
sentiment in reaction, is at the world’s end from that rough and
boisterous communal fun; it is equally removed from delight in tragedy,
itself a sign of youth.[335] To trace the course of modern poetic humour
from Chaucer, Villon, Dunbar, down to Heine, who does in verse what
Sterne did in prose, would be “a journey like the path to heaven,” in
whichever sense one chooses to take the comparison,—delightful or
difficult; enough in this place to point out the flickering humour that
plays across the subjectivity and sentiment of Heine’s _Death Bed_,[336]
with its parody of Homer, its scorn for the public, and all the rest.
Such are the chief differencing factors of the poetry of art as they
appear in process of evolution from the Middle Ages to the present time.
They belong to poetic material; a further result of the process appears
in poetic style. Individual and sentimental poetry has developed a
poetic dialect and widened the gap between the speech of a poet and the
speech of common life. This goes deeper than conventional phrases and
epic repetitions, which at first sight induce one to assert precisely
the opposite view and call modern poetry a return from the conventional
to the simple in expression. Emotion, however, that is spontaneous,
communal, direct, and without taint of reflection, will catch the
nearest way and avoid deliberate or conscious figures of speech, the
trope or “turning” peculiar to our verse; and there is a steady progress
in poetry from the simple or natural[337]—which does not exclude the
metaphorical, if only metaphor be the outcome of unconscious processes
of speech—to the tropical; poetry little by little makes its own
dialect.[338] Of course there are excesses and subsequent returns to
simplicity, witness the metaphysical school of poets in England; but the
tendency is always to the individual, which is the unusual and
unexpected, and hence to the metaphorical. Precisely, too, as sentiment
turned upon itself, so the metaphorical turns upon itself and makes a
metaphor out of the literal; for example, Professor Woodberry in his
sonnet on a portrait of Columbus:—
Is this the face, and these the _finding eyes_?
But this simplicity and objective force of poetic language, rarely so
successful as here, and rare in any case, is itself subjective and the
outcome of individual assertion.
It is now in order to look at survivals of communal and primitive verse,
and to learn from a study of their differencing factors no longer what
the beginnings of poetry were not, but what they really were.