MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY
Our views of poetry, or the literature of ecstasy, illuminate many dark
crannies in one of the most unfathomable caverns of aesthetic
speculation; speculation of the connection between poetry and morals,
form and matter, art for art's sake and didacticism. It has been often
asked whether poetry should deal with moral subjects, sociological
questions, and philosophical ideas. The question disappears when we
regard literature of ecstasy in prose as poetry, for all ideas are dealt
with in prose and some may be ecstatically treated. If poetry is an
atmosphere that suffuses literature, it may bathe most various ideas.
Emotional treatment of the ideas gives us literature of ecstasy or
poetry. If the natural language of ecstasy is prose, we certainly do not
wish to see a train of philosophical, moral or sociological views
treated in verse. To this extent the old critic was right who did not
want poetry (a long composition in verse, as he understood it) to deal
with ethics or science.
The question is then not really whether poetry should be concerned with
moral, sociological or psychological themes, for these themes always
have poetry in them, and an emotional treatment of them brings the
poetry into prominence. Ideas are the substance of poetry and nearly all
ideas are moral, sociological or psychological. Even scientific facts
and metaphysical utterances may be so stated by a writer as to show the
latent poetry. The two famous passages in _Leaves of Grass_ beginning
"I open my scuttle at night" and "I am an acme of things accomplished
and an encloser of things to be" are emotional statements of the facts
of the infinity of the universe and of the evolution of man,
respectively; Whitman brought out the poetry in a philosophical and in a
scientific idea.
Moral views may be imaginatively treated and be poetry. The theme of
_Great Expectations_ is a sermon against pride and snobbery, and the
emotional treatment, especially by force of example, makes part of the
book poetry. Portrayals of hypocrites, for instance, so truthfully and
movingly artistic as to arouse an ecstatic state in the reader, become
poetry. Hence Tartuffe and Pecksniff are poetical portraits, even when
drawn in prose.
Poetry was supposed to appeal to the imagination, prose to the
intellect; poetry was presumed to be dictated by the heart, prose by the
mind; fancy was thought to hold sway in poetry, logic in prose. But
nevertheless, the great English poets like Shakespeare, Browning,
Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, gave us much poetry that was produced by
the intellect, weighed by the mind, and governed by logic. Any
intellectual and even moral performance may be elevated into poetry,
when emotionally and ecstatically presented. And philosophers like
Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have demonstrated this.
Our definition of poetry throws much light on the subject of the
relations of politics and morals, of social and philosophical problems
to poetry. Poets should instruct, while delighting, is the contention of
one group. They ought merely to express beauty and emotions, is the
emphatic demand of another class. I doubt if there has ever been a great
poet who hasn't done both of these things. If a poet is to teach he
must teach something; he must express ideas, and ideas mean thoughts
about life, and these in turn refer to the relations of man to himself,
to one another, to the opposite sex, to society, to the universe, to
nature. But it is while doing this that he must give us beauty and
emotion.
When a prose writer is purely didactic without any emotional or
aesthetic appeal he is no poet. It is manifestly absurd also for an
author to give in metre didactic works which could be better written in
prose. To this extent the disciples of art for art's sake are right,
that the poet should not give us unecstatic political, philosophical or
moral lessons in metre. If, as I believe, our emotions may be expressed
in prose or free verse probably more poetically than even in metre, it
is surely inadvisable to drive home a prosaic idea in verse, and
especially at great length. Yet this has often been done. Browning gave
us an effective harangue against spiritualism in _Mr. Sludge, "The
Medium,"_ in blank verse, Byron proved a good critic of society in _Don
Juan_, in Ottava Rima metre, Shelley preached moral reforms in the
_Revolt of Islam_, in the Spenserian stanza. Two of the best poems of
the nineteenth century, among the masterpieces of their authors, are
Swinburne's _Hertha_, and Browning's _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, and they are both
ecstatically didactic.
But the future poets will not spin out their ideas in metre at great
length. The short verse poem embodying an idea will always be with us,
but I doubt if we will have, or at least ought to have, philosophical or
moral works, extending into hundreds or thousands of lines of regular
verse.
John Addington Symonds has in his _Essays Speculative and Suggestive_
taken two of the most famous dicta in English literature regarding the
function of poetry in relation to form and matter, and given us a sane
viewpoint. He analyzes Arnold's statement that poetry is a criticism of
life, and Pater's assumption that all art, including poetry, aspires
towards the condition of music which thus in his opinion becomes the
true type or measure of consummate art. Symonds shuns both the
didacticism which Arnold's view encourages, and the worship of form
implied in Pater's statement; though it should be said that Pater in his
essay on "Style" urges that, after all, subject matter is the deciding
factor in determining great art. As Symonds says, the poet gives us
rather a revelation than a criticism of life, a presentment according to
his faculty for observing and displaying it; he is more a reporter and a
seer than a judge. Poets take their final rank by matter and not by
form. Though Symonds mentions slurringly a great poet like Baudelaire,
still the following lines should be carefully pondered by many of our
versifiers: "The carving of cherry-stones in verse, the turning of
triolets and rondeaux, the seeking after sound and color without heed
for sense, is all foredoomed to final failure." Poetry appeals to the
imaginative reason, and must embody thought and emotion. As Symonds
remarks, Pater's discrimination between these two is fanciful.
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 institute 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 noble 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 quantities.
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
circumstances. 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, massacres, 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. Shelley
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 illustrated 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
passage is lifted up into poetry, for we are brought into a state of
ecstasy by the imaginative illustration. 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 noble 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 classics 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 classics 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 attitude 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 passages 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 Shelley may be placed
parallel respectively to passages from thinkers who influenced them,
Aquinas, Bolingbroke, and Godwin, to learn that the poetry resided in
the original philosophic prose passage. 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 passages 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
passage 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 farseeing 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 passion to
tatters, or telling a story, or uttering a complaint, in order to
produce poetry. When Herbert Spencer analyzes 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 passage may not be passionate 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 passages from philosophical works that belong to
the literature of ecstasy, passages 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 passages 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 passages, 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.