great philosophers are few in number, and great philosophers who have
any gift of expression whatever or any sense of form, or whose writings
so much as approach the outer hem of literature, are even fewer in
number. Browning the philosopher is not more deep than many other
philosophers, and in form and expression he is inferior to many poets.
But he is a philosopher, and he has form and expression. The philosophy
he writes is literature, even though hardly in the highest sense poetic
literature. Therefore he appeals to men who are primarily interested
in his writings as philosophy, but who do derive a certain pleasure
from form or expression; who, without being conscious of it, do like to
have the writings they read resemble literature. These men are given
by Browning something that no other poet and no other philosopher can
give them; and I do not think that these men receive full justice at
Mr. Lounsbury’s hands. Moreover, as compared to Tennyson or Longfellow,
or any other of the more conventional poets--and I am extremely fond
of these conventional poets--there is far more in Browning, even in
Browning’s simpler and more understandable and formal poems, that
gives expression to certain deep and complex emotions. There are many
poets whom we habitually read far more often than Browning, and who
minister better to our more primitive needs and emotions. There are
very few whose lines come so naturally to us in certain great crises of
the soul which are also crises of the intellect.
* * * * *
“The Yale Book of American Verse” is an excellent anthology, and
the preface is one of the best things about it. In this preface Mr.
Lounsbury quite unconsciously shows why he appeals to so many men to
whom a college professor who is nothing more than a college professor
does not readily appeal. He mentions that on the march to Gettysburg
he picked up a torn piece of newspaper containing certain verses
which have always remained in his mind, and which he includes in this
collection of verse. This is the only hint in Professor Lounsbury’s
writings that he fought in the Civil War. A professor of English
literature in a great university who in his youth fought at Gettysburg
must necessarily have something in him that speaks not only to scholars
but to men.
This anthology includes hymns as well as secular poems. The collection
is good in itself, as I have already said, and, moreover, to all real
lovers of anthologies it will also seem good because each of them will
take much satisfaction in wondering why certain of his or her favorite
poems have been left out and why certain other poems have been put in.
I suppose every man who cares for poetry at all at times wishes that he
could compile an anthology for his own purposes. I certainly so feel.
I would like to compile two anthologies, one of hymns and one of those
poems which our ancestors designated quite ruthlessly as “profane,” in
opposition to sacred. I should not expect any one else to read either
of my collections. I should not wish the edition to consist of more
than one copy. But I would like, purely for my own use, to own that
copy! In the anthology of hymns, for instance, besides all the great
hymns, from Bernard of Morlais to Cowper and Wesley and Bishop Heber, I
would like to put in some hymns as to which I know nothing except that
I like them. Every Christmas Eve in our own church at Oyster Bay, for
instance, the children sing a hymn beginning “It’s Christmas Eve on the
River, it’s Christmas Eve on the Bay.” Of course the hymn has come to
us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average
native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our
own soil--which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the
nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.
As for the “profane” anthology, I think I should like to make one
consisting of several volumes. Even Mr. Lounsbury’s volume of American
verse, though it contains some specimens of verse I would not have
included, omits others which I certainly should put in. And then, think
of the many, many volumes that would be needed to include the English
poems, and the French poems, and the German poems from the Bard of
the Dimbovitza, and all the other poems which no human being could
make up his mind to see any anthology leave out! I fear that a perfect
anthology of the kind that fills my dreams would be as large as the
various rather dismal series of volumes which contain, as we are told,
“the world’s best literature”--and doubtless would be as unsatisfactory.
Meanwhile, as all this represents an unattainable dream, we have
reason to be glad that Mr. Lounsbury’s particular anthology has been
published.
DANTE AND THE BOWERY
DANTE AND THE BOWERY
It is the conventional thing to praise Dante because he of set purpose
“used the language of the market-place,” so as to be understanded
of the common people; but we do not in practice either admire or
understand a man who writes in the language of our own market-place.
It must be the Florentine market-place of the thirteenth century--not
Fulton Market of to-day. What infinite use Dante would have made
of the Bowery! Of course, he could have done it only because not
merely he himself, the great poet, but his audience also, would have
accepted it as natural. The nineteenth century was more apt than the
thirteenth to boast of itself as being the greatest of the centuries;
but, save as regards purely material objects, ranging from locomotives
to bank buildings, it did not wholly believe in its boasting. A
nineteenth-century poet, when trying to illustrate some point he was
making, obviously felt uncomfortable in mentioning nineteenth-century
heroes if he also referred to those of classic times, lest he
should be suspected of instituting comparisons between them. A
thirteenth-century poet was not in the least troubled by any such
misgivings, and quite simply illustrated his point by allusions to any
character in history or romance, ancient or contemporary, that happened
to occur to him.
Of all the poets of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was the only
one who dared use the Bowery--that is, use anything that was striking
and vividly typical of the humanity around him--as Dante used the
ordinary humanity of his day; and even Whitman was not quite natural
in doing so, for he always felt that he was defying the conventions
and prejudices of his neighbors, and his self-consciousness made him a
little defiant. Dante was not defiant of conventions: the conventions
of his day did not forbid him to use human nature just as he saw it,
no less than human nature as he read about it. The Bowery is one of
the great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life, of varied
interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is
haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the
“Inferno.” But no man of Dante’s art and with Dante’s soul would write
of it nowadays; and he would hardly be understood if he did. Whitman
wrote of homely things and every-day men, and of their greatness, but
his art was not equal to his power and his purpose; and, even as it
was, he, the poet, by set intention, of the democracy, is not known to
the people as widely as he should be known; and it is only the few--the
men like Edward FitzGerald, John Burroughs, and W. E. Henley--who prize
him as he ought to be prized.
Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth century, cultivated people
would ridicule the poet who illustrated fundamental truths, as Dante
did six hundred years ago, by examples drawn alike from human nature as
he saw it around him and from human nature as he read of it. I suppose
that this must be partly because we are so self-conscious as always
to read a comparison into any illustration, forgetting the fact that
no comparison is implied between two men, in the sense of estimating
their relative greatness or importance, when the career of each of them
is chosen merely to illustrate some given quality that both possess.
It is also probably due to the fact that an age in which the critical
faculty is greatly developed often tends to develop a certain querulous
inability to understand the fundamental truths which less critical ages
accept as a matter of course. To such critics it seems improper, and
indeed ludicrous, to illustrate human nature by examples chosen alike
from the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Castle Garden and the Piræus, alike from
Tammany and from the Roman mob organized by the foes or friends of
Cæsar. To Dante such feeling itself would have been inexplicable.
Dante dealt with those tremendous qualities of the human soul which
dwarf all differences in outward and visible form and station, and
therefore he illustrated what he meant by any example that seemed to
him apt. Only the great names of antiquity had been handed down, and
so, when he spoke of pride or violence or flattery, and wished to
illustrate his thesis by an appeal to the past, he could speak only
of great and prominent characters; but in the present of his day most
of the men he knew, or knew of, were naturally people of no permanent
importance--just as is the case in the present of our own day. Yet the
passions of these men were the same as those of the heroes of old,
godlike or demoniac; and so he unhesitatingly used his contemporaries,
or his immediate predecessors, to illustrate his points, without
regard to their prominence or lack of prominence. He was not concerned
with the differences in their fortunes and careers, with their heroic
proportions or lack of such proportions; he was a mystic whose
imagination soared so high and whose thoughts plumbed so deeply the far
depths of our being that he was also quite simply a realist; for the
eternal mysteries were ever before his mind, and, compared to them, the
differences between the careers of the mighty masters of mankind and
the careers of even very humble people seemed trivial. If we translate
his comparisons into the terms of our day, we are apt to feel amused
over this trait of his, until we go a little deeper and understand
that we are ourselves to blame, because we have lost the faculty simply
and naturally to recognize that the essential traits of humanity are
shown alike by big men and by little men, in the lives that are now
being lived and in those that are long ended.
Probably no two characters in Dante impress the ordinary reader more
than Farinata and Capaneus: the man who raises himself waist-high from
out his burning sepulchre, unshaken by torment, and the man who, with
scornful disdain, refuses to brush from his body the falling flames;
the great souls--magnanimous, Dante calls them--whom no torture, no
disaster, no failure of the most absolute kind could force to yield
or to bow before the dread powers that had mastered them. Dante has
created these men, has made them permanent additions to the great
figures of the world; they are imaginary only in the sense that
Achilles and Ulysses are imaginary--that is, they are now as real as
the figures of any men that ever lived. One of them was a mythical
hero in a mythical feat, the other a second-rate faction leader in a
faction-ridden Italian city of the thirteenth century, whose deeds have
not the slightest importance aside from what Dante’s mention gives.
Yet the two men are mentioned as naturally as Alexander and Cæsar are
mentioned. Evidently they are dwelt upon at length because Dante
felt it his duty to express a peculiar horror for that fierce pride
which could defy its overlord, while at the same time, and perhaps
unwillingly, he could not conceal a certain shuddering admiration for
the lofty courage on which this evil pride was based.
The point I wish to make is the simplicity with which Dante illustrated
one of the principles on which he lays most stress, by the example
of a man who was of consequence only in the history of the parochial
politics of Florence. Farinata will now live forever as a symbol of
the soul; yet as an historical figure he is dwarfed beside any one
of hundreds of the leaders in our own Revolution and Civil War. Tom
Benton, of Missouri, and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, were opposed
to one another with a bitterness which surpassed that which rived
asunder Guelph from Ghibellin, or black Guelph from white Guelph. They
played mighty parts in a tragedy more tremendous than any which any
mediæval city ever witnessed or could have witnessed. Each possessed an
iron will and undaunted courage, physical and moral; each led a life of
varied interest and danger, and exercised a power not possible in the
career of the Florentine. One, the champion of the Union, fought for
his principles as unyieldingly as the other fought for what he deemed
right in trying to break up the Union. Each was a colossal figure.
Each, when the forces against which he fought overcame him--for in his
latter years Benton saw the cause of disunion triumph in Missouri,
just as Jefferson Davis lived to see the cause of union triumph in
the Nation--fronted an adverse fate with the frowning defiance, the
high heart, and the stubborn will which Dante has commemorated for all
time in his hero who “held hell in great scorn.” Yet a modern poet who
endeavored to illustrate such a point by reference to Benton and Davis
would be uncomfortably conscious that his audience would laugh at him.
He would feel ill at ease, and therefore would convey the impression
of being ill at ease, exactly as he would feel that he was posing, was
forced and unnatural, if he referred to the deeds of the evil heroes
of the Paris Commune as he would without hesitation refer to the many
similar but smaller leaders of riots in the Roman forum.
Dante speaks of a couple of French troubadours, or of a local Sicilian
poet, just as he speaks of Euripides; and quite properly, for they
illustrate as well what he has to teach; but we of to-day could not
possibly speak of a couple of recent French poets or German novelists
in the same connection without having an uncomfortable feeling that
we ought to defend ourselves from possible misapprehension; and
therefore we could not speak of them naturally. When Dante wishes to
assail those guilty of crimes of violence, he in one stanza speaks
of the torments inflicted by divine justice on Attila (coupling him
with Pyrrhus and Sextus Pompey--a sufficiently odd conjunction in
itself, by the way), and in the next stanza mentions the names of a
couple of local highwaymen who had made travel unsafe in particular
neighborhoods. The two highwaymen in question were by no means as
important as Jesse James and Billy the Kid; doubtless they were far
less formidable fighting men, and their adventures were less striking
and varied. Yet think of the way we should feel if a great poet should
now arise who would incidentally illustrate the ferocity of the human
heart by allusions both to the terrible Hunnish “scourge of God” and
to the outlaws who in our own times defied justice in Missouri and New
Mexico!
When Dante wishes to illustrate the fierce passions of the human
heart, he may speak of Lycurgus, or of Saul; or he may speak of two
local contemporary captains, victor or vanquished in obscure struggles
between Guelph and Ghibellin; men like Jacopo del Cassero or Buonconte,
whom he mentions as naturally as he does Cyrus or Rehoboam. He is
entirely right! What one among our own writers, however, would be able
simply and naturally to mention Ulrich Dahlgren, or Custer, or Morgan,
or Raphael Semmes, or Marion, or Sumter, as illustrating the qualities
shown by Hannibal, or Rameses, or William the Conqueror, or by Moses or
Hercules? Yet the Guelph and Ghibellin captains of whom Dante speaks
were in no way as important as these American soldiers of the second or
third rank. Dante saw nothing incongruous in treating at length of the
qualities of all of them; he was not thinking of comparing the genius
of the unimportant local leader with the genius of the great sovereign
conquerors of the past--he was thinking only of the qualities of
courage and daring and of the awful horror of death; and when we deal
with what is elemental in the human soul it matters but little whose
soul we take. In the same way he mentions a couple of spendthrifts of
Padua and Siena, who come to violent ends, just as in the preceding
canto he had dwelt upon the tortures undergone by Dionysius and Simon
de Montfort, guarded by Nessus and his fellow centaurs. For some reason
he hated the spendthrifts in question as the Whigs of Revolutionary
South Carolina and New York hated Tarleton, Kruger, Saint Leger, and De
Lancey; and to him there was nothing incongruous in drawing a lesson
from one couple of offenders more than from another. (It would, by the
way, be outside my present purpose to speak of the rather puzzling
manner in which Dante confounds his own hatreds with those of heaven,
and, for instance, shows a vindictive enjoyment in putting his personal
opponent Filippo Argenti in hell, for no clearly adequate reason.)
When he turns from those whom he is glad to see in hell toward those
for whom he cares, he shows the same delightful power of penetrating
through the externals into the essentials. Cato and Manfred illustrate
his point no better than Belacqua, a contemporary Florentine maker of
citherns. Alas! what poet to-day would dare to illustrate his argument
by introducing Steinway in company with Cato and Manfred! Yet again,
when examples of love are needed, he draws them from the wedding-feast
at Cana, from the actions of Pylades and Orestes, and from the life
of a kindly, honest comb-dealer of Siena who had just died. Could
we now link together Peter Cooper and Pylades, without feeling a
sense of incongruity? He couples Priscian with a politician of local
note who had written an encyclopædia and a lawyer of distinction
who had lectured at Bologna and Oxford; we could not now with such
fine unconsciousness bring Evarts and one of the compilers of the
Encyclopædia Britannica into a like comparison.
When Dante deals with the crimes which he most abhorred, simony and
barratry, he flails offenders of his age who were of the same type as
those who in our days flourish by political or commercial corruption;
and he names his offenders, both those just dead and those still
living, and puts them, popes and politicians alike, in hell. There have
been trust magnates and politicians and editors and magazine-writers
in our own country whose lives and deeds were no more edifying than
those of the men who lie in the third and the fifth chasm of the eighth
circle of the Inferno; yet for a poet to name those men would be
condemned as an instance of shocking taste.
One age expresses itself naturally in a form that would be unnatural,
and therefore undesirable, in another age. We do not express ourselves
nowadays in epics at all; and we keep the emotions aroused in us by
what is good or evil in the men of the present in a totally different
compartment from that which holds our emotions concerning what was
good or evil in the men of the past. An imitation of the letter of the
times past, when the spirit has wholly altered, would be worse than
useless; and the very qualities that help to make Dante’s poem immortal
would, if copied nowadays, make the copyist ridiculous. Nevertheless,
it would be a good thing if we could, in some measure, achieve the
mighty Florentine’s high simplicity of soul, at least to the extent of
recognizing in those around us the eternal qualities which we admire
or condemn in the men who wrought good or evil at any stage in the
world’s previous history. Dante’s masterpiece is one of the supreme
works of art that the ages have witnessed; but he would have been
the last to wish that it should be treated only as a work of art, or
worshipped only for art’s sake, without reference to the dread lessons
it teaches mankind.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[8]
Mr. H. S. Chamberlain’s work on “The Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century” is a noteworthy book in more ways than one. It is written by
an Englishman who has been educated on the Continent, and has lived
there until he is much more German than English. Previously he had
written a book in French, while this particular book was written in
German, and has only recently been translated into English. Adequately
to review the book, or rather to write an adequate essay suggested by
it, would need the space that would have been taken by an old-time
Quarterly or Edinburgh Reviewer a century or fourscore years ago. I
have called the book “noteworthy,” and this it certainly is. It ranks
with Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” and still more with Gobineau’s
“Inégalité des Races Humaines,” for its brilliancy and suggestiveness
and also for its startling inaccuracies and lack of judgment. A
witty English critic once remarked of Mitford that he had all the
qualifications of an historian--violent partiality and extreme wrath.
Mr. Chamberlain certainly possesses these qualifications in excess,
and, combined with a queer vein of the erratic in his temperament, they
almost completely offset the value of his extraordinary erudition,
extending into widely varied fields, and of his occasionally really
brilliant inspiration. He is, however, always entertaining; which is
of itself no mean merit, in view of the fact that most serious writers
seem unable to regard themselves as serious unless they are also dull.
[8] “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.” By Houston
Stewart Chamberlain. A translation from the German, by
John Lees. With an introduction by Lord Redesdale. In two
volumes.
Mr. Chamberlain’s thesis is that the nineteenth century, and therefore
the twentieth and all future centuries, depend for everything in them
worth mentioning and preserving upon the Teutonic branch of the Aryan
race. He holds that there is no such thing as a general progress of
mankind, that progress is only for those whom he calls the Teutons,
and that when they mix with or are intruded upon by alien and, as he
regards them, lower races, the result is fatal. Much that he says
regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general
progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like,
is not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth considering by a
generation accustomed, as its forefathers for the preceding generations
were accustomed, to accept as true and useful thoroughly pernicious
doctrines taught by well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists; but
Mr. Chamberlain himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as any of
those whom he derides, and an extremist whose doctrines are based upon
foolish hatred is even more unlovely than an extremist whose doctrines
are based upon foolish benevolence. Mr. Chamberlain’s hatreds cover a
wide gamut. They include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church,
the people of southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety
of literary men and historians.[9] To this sufficiently incongruous
collection of antipathies he adds a much smaller selection of violent
attachments, ranging from imaginary primitive Teutons and Aryans to
Immanuel Kant, and Indian theology, metaphysics, and philosophy--he
draws sharp distinctions between all three, and I merely use them to
indicate his admiration for the Indian habit of thought, an admiration
which goes hand in hand with and accentuates his violent hatred for
what most sane people regard as the far nobler thought contained, for
instance, in the Old Testament. He continually contradicts himself, or
at least uses words in such diametrically opposite senses as to convey
the effect of contradiction; and so it would be possible to choose
phrases of his which contradict what is here said; but I think that I
give a correct impression of his teaching as a whole.
[9] Some of his antipathies appeal to the present writer;
I much enjoy his irrelevant and hearty denunciation of
the folly of treating the comparatively trivial Latin
literature as of such peculiar importance as to entitle it
to be grouped in grotesque association with the magnificent
Greek literature under the unmeaning title of “classic.”