judgment long held that Mr. Hergesheimer is one of the most
skilful craftsmen in English in our day. And this I say in spite
of his obvious failure to grasp inevitably the structure of the
English sentence. He is one of the most honest analysts of a
situation, also; one of the most fearless seekers of motives; one
of the ablest practisers of that transmutation of obscure emotion
into the visible detail of dress, habit, expression, which is the
real technique of the novelist. His fault is a defect in sympathy,
a lack of spiritual appreciation, if I may use and leave undefined
so old-fashioned a term. His virtue lies in the rich garment of
experience which careful observation and skilful writing enable
him to wrap about his imaginative conceptions. It is this which
makes his novels so readable for the discriminating at present,
and will make them useful historical records in the future. One
aspect of a troublesome period when the middle generation achieved
the irresponsibility without the earnestness of youth he has
caught in "Cytherea." It is unfortunate that it is a partial
portrait of important motives in people who themselves are of
little importance; and it is doubly unfortunate that he has been
too much a part of his muddy world to be as good an interpreter as
he is a witness of its life.
January 21, 1922.
V
PHILISTINES AND DILETTANTE
POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL
I have looked through more essays upon poetry than I care to
remember without finding anywhere a discussion of poetry for the
unpoetical. A recent writer, it is true, has done much to show
that the general reader daily indulges in poetry of a kind without
knowing it. But the voluminous literature of poetics is well-nigh
all special. It is written for students of rhythm, for instinctive
lovers of poetry, for writers of verse, for critics. It does not
treat of the value of poetry for the average, the unpoetical man--
it says little of his curious distaste for all that is not prose,
or of the share in all good poetry that belongs to him.
By the average man, let me hasten to say, I mean in this instance
the average intelligent reader, who has passed through the usual
formal education in literature, who reads books as well as
newspapers and magazines, who, without calling himself a
litterateur, would be willing to assert that he was fairly well
read and reasonably fond of good reading. Your doctor, your
lawyer, the president of your bank, and any educated business man
who has not turned his brain into a machine, will fit my case.
Among such excellent Americans, I find that there exists a double
standard as regards all literature, but especially poetry. Just as
the newspapers always write of clean politics with reverence--
whatever may be the private opinions and practices of their
editorial writers--so intelligent, though unpoetic, readers are
accustomed to speak of poetry with very considerable respect. It
is not proper to say, "I hate poetry," even if one thinks it. To
admit ignorance of Tennyson or Milton or Shakespeare is bad form,
even if one skimmed through them in college and has never
disturbed the dust upon their covers since. I have heard a
whispered, sneering remark after dinner, "I don't believe he ever
_heard_ of Browning," by one who had penetrated about as far
into Browning's inner consciousness as a fly into the hickory-nut
it crawls over. I well remember seeing a lady of highly
respectable culture hold up her hands in horror before a college
graduate who did not know who Beowulf was. Neither did she, in any
true sense of knowing. But her code taught her that the "Beowulf,"
like other "good poetry," should be upon one's list of
acquaintances.
What these Americans really think is a very different matter. The
man in the trolley-car, the woman in the rocking-chair, the clerk,
the doctor, the manufacturer, most lawyers, and some ministers
would, if their hearts were opened, give simply a categorical
negative. They do not like poetry, or they think they do not like
it; in either case with the same result. The rhythm annoys them
(little wonder, since they usually read it as prose), the rhyme
seems needless, the inversions, the compressions perplex their
minds to no valuable end. Speaking honestly, they do not like
poetry. And if their reason is the old one,
I do not like you, Dr. Fell;
The reason why I cannot tell,
it is none the less effective.
But the positive answers are no more reassuring. Here in America
especially, when we like poetry, we like it none too good. The
"old favorites" are almost all platitudinous in thought and
monotonous in rhythm. We prefer sentiment, and have a weakness for
slush. Pathos seems to us better than tragedy, anecdote than wit.
Longfellow was and is, except in metropolitan centres, our
favorite "classical" poet; the poetical corner and the daily poem
of the newspapers represent what most of us like when we do go in
for verse. The truth is that many of the intelligent in our
population skip poetry in their reading just because it _is_
poetry. They read no poetry, or they read bad poetry occasionally,
or they read good poetry badly.
This sorry state of affairs does not trouble the literary critic.
His usual comment is that either one loves poetry or one does not,
and that is all there is to be said about it. If the general
reader neglects poetry, why then he belongs to the Lost Tribes and
signifies nothing for Israel.
I am sure that he is wrong. His assertion is based on the theory
that every man worthy of literary salvation must at all times love
and desire the best literature, which is poetry--and this is a
fallacy. It is as absurd as if he should ask most of us to dwell
in religious exaltation incessantly, or to live exclusively upon
mountain peaks, or to cultivate rapture during sixteen hours of
the twenty-four. The saints, the martyrs, the seers, the seekers,
and enthusiasts have profited nobly by such a regime, but not we
of common clay. To assume in advocating the reading of poetry that
one should substitute Pope for the daily paper, Francis Thompson
for the illustrated weekly, _The Ring and the Book_ for a
magazine, and read "The Golden Treasury" through instead of a
novel, needs only to be stated to be disproved. And yet this is
the implication of much literary criticism.
But the sin of the general reader who refuses all poetry is much
more deadly, for it is due not to enthusiasm, but to ignorance. It
is true that the literary diet recommended by an aesthetic critic
would choke a healthy business man; but it is equally true that
for all men whose emotions are still alive within them, and whose
intelligence permits the reading of verse, poetry is quite as
valuable as fresh air and exercise. We do not need fresh air and
exercise constantly. We can get along very comfortably without
them. But if they are not essential commodities, they are
important ones, and so is poetry--a truth of which modern readers
seem to be as ignorant as was primitive man of fire until he
burned his hand in a blazing bush.
I do not mean for an instant to propose that every one should read
poetry. The man whose imagination has never taken fire from
literature of any kind, whose brain is literal and dislikes any
embroidery upon the surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music,
unresponsive to ideas, and limited in his emotions--such a man in
my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an excellent
citizen, lives happily, makes a good husband, and may save the
state. But he should not (no danger that he will) read poetry. And
for another class there is nothing in poetry. The emotionally
dying or dead; the men who have sunk themselves, their
personalities, their hopes, their happiness, in business or
scholarship or politics or sport--they, too, are often useful
citizens, and usually highly prosperous; but they would waste
their time upon literature of any variety, and especially upon
poetry.
There are a dozen good arguments, however, to prove that the
reading of poetry is good for the right kind of general reader,
who is neither defective nor dead in his emotions; and this means,
after all, a very large percentage of all readers. If I had space
I should use them all, for I realize that the convention we have
adopted for poetry makes us skip, in our magazines, as naturally
from story to story over the verse between as from stone to stone
across the brook. However, I choose only two, which seem to me as
convincing for the unpoetical reader (the dead and defective
excepted) as the ethical grandeur of poetry, let us say, for the
moralist, its beauty for the aesthete, its packed knowledge for the
scholar.
The first has often been urged before and far more often
overlooked. We everyday folk plod year after year through routine,
through fairly good or fairly bad, never quite realizing what we
are experiencing, never seeing life as a whole, or any part of it,
perhaps, in complete unity. Words, acts, sights, pass through our
experience hazily, suggesting meanings which we never fully grasp.
Grief and love, the most intense, perhaps, of sensations, we
seldom understand except by comparison with what has been said of
the grief and love of others. Happiness remains at best a diffused
emotion--felt, but not comprehended. Thought, if in some moment
of intense clarity it grasps our relationship to the stream of
life, in the next shreds into trivialities. Is this true? Test it
by any experience that is still fresh in memory. See how dull, by
comparison with the vivid colors of the scene itself, are even now
your ideas of what it meant to you, how obscure its relations to
your later life. The moment you fell in love, the hour after your
child had died, the instant when you reached the peak, the quarrel
that began a misunderstanding not yet ended, the subtle household
strain that pulls apart untiringly though it never sunders two who
love each other--all these I challenge you to define, to explain,
to lift into the light above the turbid sea of complex currents
which is life.
And this, of course, is what good poetry does. It seizes the
moment, the situation, the thought; drags it palpitating from life
and flings it, quivering with its own rhythmic movement, into
expression. The thing cannot be done in mere prose, for there is
more than explanation to the process. The words themselves, in
their color and suggestiveness, the rhythms that carry them,
contribute to the sense, even as overtones help to make the music.
All this may sound a little exalted to the comfortable general
reader, who does not often deal in such intense commodities as
death and love. And yet I have mentioned nothing that does not at
one time or another, and frequently rather than the opposite, come
into his life, and need, not constant, certainly, but at least
occasional, interpretation. Death and love, and also friendship,
jealousy, courage, self-sacrifice, hate--these cannot be avoided.
We must experience them. So do the animals, who gain from their
experiences blind, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes and
distrusts. There are many ways of escaping from such a bovine
acquiescence, content to have felt, not desirous to grasp and know
and relate. Poetry, which clears and intensifies like a glass held
upon a distant snowpeak, is one of the best.
But there is another service that poetry, among all writing, best
renders to the general reader, _when he needs it_; a service
less obvious, but sometimes, I think, more important. Poetry
insures an extension of youth.
Men and women vary in their emotional susceptibility. Some go
through life always clouded, always dull, like a piece of glass
cut in semblance of a gem, that refracts no colors and is empty of
light. Others are vivid, impressionable, reacting to every
experience. Some of us are most aroused by contact with one
another. Interest awakens at the sound of a voice; we are most
alive when most with our kind. Others, like Thoreau, respond best
in solitude. The very thrush singing dimly in the hemlocks at
twilight moves them more powerfully than a cheer. A deep meadow
awave with headed grass, a solemn hill shouldering the sky, a
clear blue air washing over the pasture slopes and down among the
tree-tops of the valley, thrills them more than all the men in all
the streets of the world. It makes no difference. To every one,
dull and vivid, social and solitary, age brings its changes. We
may understand better, but the vividness is less, the emotions are
tamer. They do not fully respond, as the bell in the deserted
house only half tinkles to our pulling.
Si jeunesse savait,
Si vielliesse pouvait.
But to be able comes before to know. We must react to experiences
before it is worth while to comprehend them. And after one is well
enmeshed in the routine of plodding life, after the freshness of
the emotions (and this is a definition of youth) is gone, it is
difficult to react. I can travel now, if I wish, to the coral
islands or the Spanish Main, but it is too late.
Few willingly part with the fresh impressionability of youth.
Sometimes, as I have already suggested, the faculties of sensation
become atrophied, if indeed they ever existed. I know no more
dismal spectacle than a man talking shop on a moonlit hill in
August, a woman gossipping by the rail of a steamer plunging
through the sapphire of the Gulf Stream, or a couple perusing
advertisements throughout a Beethoven symphony. I will not advance
as typical a drummer I once saw read a cheap magazine from cover
to cover in the finest stretch of the Canadian Rockies. He was not
a man, but a sample-fed, word-emitting machine. These people,
emotionally speaking, are senile. They should not try to read
poetry.
But most of us--even those who are outwardly commonplace,
practical, unenthusiastic, "solid," and not "sensitive"--lose our
youthful keenness with regret. And that is why poetry, except for
the hopelessly sodden, is a tonic worthy of a great price. For the
right poetry at the right time has the indubitable power to stir
the emotions that experience is no longer able to arouse. I cannot
give satisfactory instances, for the reaction is highly personal.
What with me stirs a brain cell long dormant to action will leave
another unmoved, and vice versa. However, to make clear my
meaning, let us take Romance, the kind that one capitalizes, that
belongs to Youth, also capitalized, and dwells in Granada or
Sicily or the Spanish Main. The middle-aged gentleman on a winter
cruise for his jaded nerves cannot expect a thrill from sights
alone. If it is not lost for him utterly, it is only because Keats
has kept it, in--
... Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, q and Nashe in--
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair.
Or consider the joy of travel renewed in Kipling's--
Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,
And the shouting seas drive by,
And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and
swing,
And the Southern Cross rides high!
Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
That blaze in the velvet blue.
Or the multitudinous experiences of vivid life that crowd the
pages of men like Shakespeare, or Chaucer, who thanked God that he
had known his world as in his time. Even in these shopworn
quotations the power still remains.
Somewhere in poetry, and best in poetry because there most
concentrated and most penetrative, lies crystallized experience at
hand for all who need it. It is not difficult to find, although no
one can find it for you. It is not necessarily exalted, romantic,
passionate; it may be comfortable, homely, gentle or hearty,
vigorous and cheerful; it may be anything but commonplace, for no
true emotion is ever commonplace. I have known men of one poet;
and yet that poet gave them the satisfaction they required. I know
others whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of
beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet without poetry
they would be less alive, their minds would be less young. As
children, most of us would have flushed before the beauty of a
sunrise on a tropic ocean, felt dimly if profoundly--and
forgotten. The poet--like the painter--has caught, has
interpreted, has preserved the experience, so that, like music, it
may be renewed. And he can perform that miracle for greater things
than sunrises. This, perhaps, is the best of all reasons why every
one except the emotionally senile should sometimes read poetry.
I know at least one honest Philistine who, unlike many
Philistines, has traveled through the Promised Land--and does not
like it. When his emotional friends talk sentimentalism and call
it literature, or his aesthetic acquaintances erect affectations
and call them art, he has the proper word of irony that brings
them back to food, money, and other verities. His voice haunts me
now, suggesting that, in spite of the reasons I have advanced, the
general reader can scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and
that therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He would say
that most modern poetry is unreadable, at least by the average
man. He would say that if the infinitely complex study of
emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of Edwin
Arlington Robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the
harsh virility of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensification
and clarification of experience, he begs to be excused. He would
say that if the lyrics of subtle and passionate emotion and the
drab stories of sex experience that make up so many pages of
modern anthologies represent a renewal and extension of youth, it
was not _his_ youth. He prefers to be sanely old rather than
erotically young. He will stick to the daily paper and flat prose.
Well, it is easy to answer him by ruling out modern poetry from
the argument. There was more good poetry, neither complex, nor
erotic, nor esoteric, written before our generation than even a
maker of anthologies is likely to read. But I am not willing to
dodge the issue so readily. There _is_ modern poetry for every reader
who is competent to read poetry at all. If there is none too much of
it, that is his own fault. If there is much that makes no appeal to
him, that is as it should be.
It is true that a very large proportion of contemporary poetry is
well-nigh unintelligible to the gentleman whose reading, like his
experience, does not often venture beyond the primitive emotions.
Why should it not be? The modern lyric is untroubled by the social
conscience. It is highly individual, for it is written by men of
intense individuality for readers whose imaginations require an
intimate appeal. Such minds demand poetry prevailingly, just as
the average reader demands prose prevailingly. They profit by
prose now and then, just as, occasionally, he profits by poetry.
We talk so much of the enormous growth of the mass of average
readers in recent years that we forget the corresponding growth in
the number of individualities that are not average. Much modern
poetry is written for such readers, for men and women whose minds
are sensitive to intricate emotional experience, who can and do
respond to otherworldliness, to the subtly romantic, the finely
aesthetic, and the intricately ideal. They deserve whatever poetry
they may desire.
The important point to note is that they do not get it. It is
they--far more than the Philistines--who complain that modern
poetry is insufficient for their needs. The highly personal lyric
is probably more perfected, more abundant, and more poignant in
its appeal to living minds now than ever before in the history of
our civilization. But it occupies only one province of poetry. A
lover of poetry desires, far more keenly than the general reader,
to have verse of his own day that is more Shakespearian, more
Miltonic, more Sophoclean than this. He wants poetry that lifts
spacious times into spacious verse, poetry that "enlumynes," like
Petrarch's "rhetorike sweete," a race and a civilization. He
desires, in addition to what he is already getting, precisely that
poetry so universal in its subject-matter and its appeal, which
the general reader thinks he would read if he found it instead of
"lyrical subtleties" in his pages.
Well, they do not get it very abundantly to-day, let us admit the
fact freely. But the fault is not altogether the poets'. The fault
is in the intractable mediocrity of the age, which resists
transference into poetry as stiff clay resists the hoe of the
cultivator. The fault lies in the general reader himself, whose
very opposition to poetry because it _is_ poetry makes him a
difficult person to write for. Commercialized minds, given over to
convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, or wasting them
upon cheap and meretricious literature, do not make a good
audience. Our few poets in English who have possessed some
universality of appeal have had to make concessions. Kipling has
been the most popular among good English poets in our time; but he
has had to put journalism into much of his poetry in order to
succeed. And Kipling is not read so much as a certain American
writer who discovered that by writing verse in prose form he could
make the public forget their prejudice against poetry and indulge
their natural pleasure in rhythm and rime.
A striking proof of all that I have been writing is to be found in
so-called magazine verse. Sneers at magazine poetry are unjust
because they are unintelligent. It is quite true that most of it
consists of the highly individualistic lyric of which I have
spoken above. But in comparison with the imaginative prose of the
typical popular magazine, it presents a most instructive contrast.
The prose is too frequently sensational or sentimental, vulgar or
smart. The verse, even though narrow in its appeal, and sometimes
slight, is at least excellent in art, admirable in execution, and
vigorous and unsentimental in tone. Regarded as literature, it is
very much more satisfactory than the bulk of magazine prose.
Indeed, there is less difference between the best and the worst of
our magazines than between the verse and the prose in any one of
them.
And if this verse is too special in its subject-matter to be
altogether satisfactory, if so little of it appeals to the general
reader, is it not his fault? He neglects the poetry from habit
rather than from conviction based on experience. Because he skips
it, and has skipped it until habit has become a convention, much
of it has become by natural adaptation of supply to demand too
literary, too narrow, too subtle and complex for him now. The
vicious circle is complete.
This circle may soon be broken. A ferment, which in the 'nineties
stirred in journalism, and a decade later transformed our drama,
is working now in verse. The poetical revival now upon us may be
richer so far in promise than in great poetry, but it is very
significant. For one thing, it is advertising poetry, and since
poetry is precisely what Shakespeare called it, caviare to the
general--a special commodity for occasional use--a little
advertising will be good for it. Again, the verse that has sprung
from the movement is much of it thoroughly interesting. Some of it
is as bizarre as the new art of the futurists and the vorticists;
some is merely vulgar, some merely affected, some hopelessly
obscure; but other poems, without convincing us of their
greatness, seem as original and creative as were Browning and
Whitman in their day. Probably, like the new painting, the
movement is more significant than the movers.
Nevertheless, if one is willing to put aside prejudice, suspend
judgment, and look ahead, _vers libre_, even when more _libre_ than
_vers_, is full of meaning--poetic realism, even when more real than
poetry, charged with possibility. For with all its imperfections much
of this new poetry is trying to mean more than ever before to the
general reader. I am not sure that the democracy can be interpreted
for him in noble poetry and remain the democracy he knows. And yet I
think, and I believe, that, in his sub-consciousness at least, he
feels an intense longing to find the everyday life in which we all
live--so thrilling beneath the surface--interpreted, swung into that
rhythmic significance that will make it part of the vast and flowing
stream of all life. I can tolerate many short, rough words in poetry,
and much that we have been accustomed to regard as prose, on the way
to such a goal.