At our last meeting we endeavored to secure some solid basis for our
ideas of form in general, and to develop thereupon some conceptions of
form in art, and especially of literary form, which would enable us to
see our way clear among misconceptions of this subject which prevail.
We there addressed ourselves towards considering particularly three of
these misconceptions. The first we examined was that which predicts
the total death of imaginative literature--poetry, novels and all--in
consequence of a certain supposed quality of imagination by virtue of
which, like some ruin-haunting animals, it cannot live in the light;
so that the destructive explanations of advancing science, it was
apprehended, would gradually force all our imaginative energies back
into the dark crevices of old fable and ruined romance, until finally,
penetrating these also, it would exterminate the species. We first
tested this case by laying it alongside the historic facts in the
case: confining our view to England, we found that science and poetry
had been developing alongside of each other ever since early in the
seventeenth century; inquiring into the general effect of this long
contact, we could only find that it was to make our general poetry
greatly richer in substance and finer in form; and upon testing this
abstract conclusion by a concrete examination of Tennyson--as a poet
most likely to show the influence of science, because himself most
exposed to it, indeed most saturated with it--we found from several
readings in _In Memoriam_ that whether as to love or friendship, or
the sacredness of marriage, or the pure sense of beauty, or the true
relation of knowledge to wisdom, or faith in God, the effect of
science had been on the whole to broaden the conceptions and to
clarify the forms in which they were expressed by this great poet.
And having thus appealed to facts, we found further that in the nature
of things no such destruction could follow; that what we call
explanation in science is at bottom only a reduction of unfamiliar
mysteries to terms of familiar mysteries, and that, since to the true
imaginative mind, whether of poet or novelist, the mysteries of this
world grow all the greater as they grow more familiar, the necessary
effect of scientific explanations is at last the indefinite increase
of food for the imagination. The modern imagination, indeed, shall
still love mystery; but it is not the shallow mystery of those small
darks which are enclosed by caves and crumbling dungeons, it is the
unfathomable mystery of the sunlight and the sun; it is this
inexplicable contradictory shadow of the infinite which is projected
upon the finite; it is this multitudinous flickering of all the other
_ego's_ upon the tissue of my _ego_: these are the lights and shades
and vaguenesses of mystery in which the modern imaginative effort
delights. And here I cannot help adding to what was said on this
subject in the last lecture, by declaring to every young man who may
entertain the hope of poethood, that at this stage of the world you
need not dream of winning the attention of sober people with your
poetry unless that poetry, and your soul behind it, are informed and
saturated at least with the largest final conceptions of current
science. I do not mean that you are to write "Loves of the Plants;" I
do not mean that you are to versify Biology; but I mean that you must
be so far instinct with the scientific thought of the time that your
poetic conceptions will rush as it were from under these pure, cold
facts of science like those Alpine torrents which flow out of
glaciers. Or,--to change the figure for the better--just as the
chemist, in causing chlorine and hydrogen to form hydrochloric acid,
finds that he must not only put the chlorine and hydrogen together,
but he must put them together in the presence of light in order to
make them combine; so the poet of our time will find that his poetic
combinations, his grandest syntheses of wisdom, own this law; and
they, too, must be effected in the presence of the awful light of
science.
Returning to our outline of the last lecture: After we had discussed
this matter, we advanced to the second of the great misconceptions of
the function of form in art--that which holds that the imaginative
effort of the future will be better than that of the present, and that
this improvement will come through a progress towards formlessness.
After quoting several sentences from Whitman which seemed to contain
the substantial argument--to-wit, that the poetry of the future is to
be signalized by independence of form, and is, by virtue of this
independence, to gain strength, and become a democratic poetry, as
contrasted with the supposed weak and aristocratic poetry of the
present--I called your attention to a notable circumstance which seems
to throw a curious light along this inquiry: that circumstance being
that the two English poets who have most exclusively laid claim to
represent the people in poetry, to express nothing but the people's
heart in the people's words, namely Wordsworth and Whitman, are
precisely the two whose audience has been most exclusively confined to
the other extreme of culture. Wordsworth, instead of appealing to
Hodge, Nokes, and Stiles; instead of being found in penny editions on
the collier's shelves; is most cherished by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the
high-priest of culture. And so with Whitman: we may say with safety
that no preacher was ever so decisively rejected by his own:
continually crying democracy in the market-place, and crying it in
forms or no-forms professing to be nothing but products of the
democratic spirit; nevertheless the democracy everywhere have turned a
deaf ear, and it is only with a few of the most retired thinkers of
our time that Whitman has found even a partial acceptance.
And finally, by way of showing a reason for this state of things in
Whitman's case, the last lecture closed with the assertion that
Whitman's poetry, in spite of his belief that it is democratic, is
really aristocratic to the last degree; and instead of belonging, as
he asserts to an early and fresh-thoughted stage of a republic, is
really poetry which would be impossible except in a highly civilized
state of society.
Here, then, let us take up the thread of that argument. In the
quotations which were given from Whitman's paper, we have really the
ideal democracy and democrat of this school. It is curious to reflect
in the first place that in point of fact no such democracy, no such
democrat, has ever existed in this country. For example: when Whitman
tells us of "the measureless viciousness of the great radical
republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud
ill-pitched voice; its fights, errors, eructations, dishonesties,
audacities;" _et cetera_: when he tells us this, with a sort of
caressing touch upon all the bad adjectives, rolling the "errors" and
the "audacities" and the "viciousness" under his tongue and faithfully
believing that the strength which recommends his future poetry is to
come out of viciousness and ruffianly elections and the like; let us
inquire, to what representative facts in our history does this
picture correspond; what great democrat who has helped to "block out"
this present republic, sat for this portrait? Is it George Washington,
that beautiful, broad tranquil spirit whom, I sometimes think, even we
Americans have never yet held quite at his true value,--is it
Washington who was vicious, dishonest, audacious, combative? But
Washington had some hand in blocking out this republic. Or what would
our courtly and philosophic Thomas Jefferson look like, if you should
put this slouch hat on him, and open his shirt-front at the bosom, and
set him to presiding over a ruffianly nomination? Yet he had some hand
in blocking out this republic. In one of Whitman's poems I find him
crying out to Americans, in this same strain: "O lands! would you be
freer than all that has ever been before? If you would be freer than
all that has been before, come listen to me." And this is the
deliverance:
"Fear grace--fear elegance, civilization, delicatesse,
Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey-juice;
Beware the advancing mortal ripening of nature,
Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of States and men."
And in another line, he rejoices in America because--"Here are the
roughs, beards, ... combativeness, and the like".
But where are these roughs, these beards, and this combativeness? Were
the Adamses and Benjamin Franklin roughs? was it these who taught us
to make ruffianly nominations? But they had some hand in blocking out
this republic. In short, leaving each one to extend this list of names
for himself, it may be fairly said that nowhere in history can one
find less of that ruggedness which Whitman regards as the essential
of democracy; nowhere more of that grace which he considers fatal to
it, than among the very representative democrats who blocked out this
republic. In truth, when Whitman cries "fear the mellow sweet," and
"beware the mortal ripening of nature", we have an instructive
instance of the extreme folly into which a man may be led by mistaking
a metaphor for an argument. The argument here is, you observe, that
because an apple in the course of nature rots soon after it mellows,
_argal_ a man cannot mellow his spirit with culture without decaying
soon afterwards. Of course it is sufficient only to reflect _non
sequitur_; for it is precisely the difference between the man and the
apple, that, whereas every apple must rot after ripeness, no man is
bound to.
If therefore after an inquiry ranging from Washington and Jefferson
down to William Cullen Bryant (that surely unrugged and graceful
figure who was so often called the finest American gentleman) and
Lowell, and Longfellow, and the rest who are really the men that are
blocking out our republic, if we find not a single representative
American democrat to whom any of these pet adjectives apply,--not one
who is measurelessly vicious, or ruffianly, or audacious, or purposely
rugged, or contemptuous towards the graces of life,--then we are
obliged to affirm that the whole ideal drawn by Whitman is a fancy
picture with no counterpart in nature. It is perfectly true that we
have ruffianly nominations; but we have them because the real
democrats who govern our republic, who represent our democracy, stay
away from nominating conventions and leave them to the ruffians.
Surely no one can look with the most cursory eye upon our everyday
American life without seeing that the real advance of our society goes
on not only without, but largely in spite of that ostensible
apparatus, legislative, executive, judicial which we call the
Government, &c.; that really the most effective legislation in our
country is that which is enacted in the breasts of the individual
democrats who compose it. And this is true democratic growth, every
day; more and more, each man perceives that the shortest and most
effectual method of securing his own rights is to respect the rights
of others; and so every day do we less and less need outside
interference in our individual relations; so that every day we
approach nearer and nearer towards that ideal government in which each
man is, mainly, his own legislator, his own governor or president, and
his own judge, and in which the public government is mainly a concert
of measures for the common sanitation and police.
But again: it is true as Whitman says that we have dishonesties; but
we punish them, they are not representative, they have no more
relation to democracy than the English thief has to English
aristocracy.
From what spirit of blindness is it alleged that these things are
peculiar to our democracy? Whitman here explicitly declares that the
over-dainty Englishman "can not stomach the high-life below stairs of
our social status so far;" this high-life consisting of the
measureless viciousness, the dishonesty, and the like. Cannot stomach
it, no; who could? But how absurd to come down to this republic, to
American society for these things! Alas, I know an Englishman, who,
three hundred years ago, found these same things in that aristocracy
there; and he too, thank heaven, could not stomach them, for he has
condemned them in a sonnet which is the solace of all sober-thoughted
ages. I mean Shakspeare, and his sonnet