In our modern democratic communities the moral sense is no doubt higher
than it was in the earlier ages, while the artistic or æsthetic sense
is lower. In the Athenian the artistic sense was far above the moral;
in the Puritan the reverse was the case. The Latin races seem to have
a greater genius for art than the Teutonic, while the latter excel in
virtue. In this country, good taste exists in streaks and spots, or
sporadically here and there. There does not seem to be enough to go
around, or the supply is intermittent. One writer has it and another
has it not, or one has it to-day and not to-morrow; one moment he
writes with grace and simplicity, the next he falls into crudenesses or
affectations. There is not enough leaven to leaven the whole lump. Some
of our most eminent literary men, such as Lowell and Dr. Holmes, are
guilty of occasional lapses from good taste, and probably in the work
of none of them do we see the thorough ripening and mellowing of taste
that mark the productions of the older and more centralized European
communities. One of our college presidents, writing upon a serious
ethical subject, allows himself such rhetoric as this: “Experiment
and inference are the hook and line by which Science fishes the dry
formulas out of the fluid fact. Art, on the other hand, undertakes
to stock the stream with choice specimens of her own breeding and
selection.” We can hardly say of such metaphors what Sainte-Beuve
said of Montaigne’s, namely, that they are of the kind that are never
“detached from the thought,” but that they “seize it in its very
centre, in its interior, and join and bind it.”
V
The keener appreciation in Europe of literature as a fine art is no
doubt the main reason why Poe is looked upon over there as our most
noteworthy poet. Poe certainly had a more consummate art than any other
American singer, and his productions are more completely the outcome
of that art. They are literary feats. “The Raven” was as deliberately
planned and wrought out as is any piece of mechanism. Its inspiration
is verbal and technical. “The truest poetry is most feigning,” says
Touchstone, and this is mainly the conception of poetry that prevails
in European literary circles. Poe’s poetry is artistic feigning, like
good acting. It is to that extent disinterested. He does not speak for
himself, but for the artistic spirit. He has never been popular in this
country, for the reason that art, as such, is far less appreciated here
than abroad. The stress of life here is upon the moral and intellectual
elements much more than upon the æsthetic. We demand a message of the
poet, or that he shall teach us how to live. Poe had no message but
that of art; he made no contribution to our stock of moral ideas; he
made no appeal to the conscience or manhood of the race; he did not
touch the great common workaday mind of our people. He is more akin to
the Latin than to the Anglo-Saxon. Hence his deepest impression seems
to have been made upon the French mind. In all our New England poets
the voice of humanity, of patriotism, of religious ideas, of strenuous
moral purpose, speaks. Art is subordinated to various human passions
and emotions. In Poe alone are these emotions subordinated to art.
In Poe alone is the effort mainly a verbal and technical one. In him
alone is the man lost in the artist. To evoke music from language is
his constant aim. No other American poet approaches him in this kind
of verbal mastery, in this unfettered creative technical power. In
ease, in splendor, in audacity, he is like a bird. One may understand
and admire him and not be touched by him. To be moved to anything
but admiration is foreign to pure art. Would one make meat and drink
of it? Our reading is selfish, we seek our own, we are drawn to the
book that is going our way. Can we appreciate beyond our own personal
tastes and needs? Can we see the excellence of the impersonal and the
disinterested? We want to be touched in some special and intimate
way; but art touches us in a general and impersonal way. No one could
take to himself Shakespeare, or Milton’s “Lycidas,” or Keats’s odes
as directed especially to his own personal wants and aspirations. We
forget ourselves in reading these things, and share for the time the
sentiment of pure art, which lives in the universal. How crude the art
of Whittier compared with that of Poe, and yet Whittier has touched
and moved his countrymen, and Poe has not. There is much more of the
substance of character, of patriotism, of strenuous New England life,
in the one than in the other. “Snow-Bound” is a metrical transcript
from experience; not a creation of the imagination, but a touched-up
copy from the memory. We cannot say this of “The Bells” or “The Raven,”
or of the work of Milton or Keats or Tennyson. Whittier sings what he
feels; it all has a root in his own experience. The great poet feigns
the emotion and makes it real to us.
We complain of much current verse that it has no feeling. The trouble
is not that the poets feign, but that the feigning is feeble; it begets
no emotion in us. It simulates, but does not stimulate.
It is not Wordsworth’s art that makes him great; it is his profound
poetic emotion when in the presence of simple, common things.
Tennyson’s art, or Swinburne’s art, is much finer, but the poetic
emotion back of it is less profound and elemental.
Emerson’s art is crude, but the stress of his poetic emotion is great;
the song is burdened with profound meanings to our moral and spiritual
nature. Poe has no such burden; there is not one crumb of the bread of
life in him, but there is plenty of the elixir of the imagination.
This passion for art, so characteristic of the Old World, is seen in
its full force in such a writer as Flaubert. Flaubert was a devotee of
the doctrine of art for art’s sake. He cared nothing for mere authors,
but only for “writers;” the work must be the conscious and deliberate
product of the author’s literary and inventive powers, and in no way
involve his character, temperament, or personality. The more it was
written, the more it savored of deliberate plan and purpose,--in other
words, the less it was the product of fate, race, or of anything local,
individual, inevitable,--the more it pleased him. Art, and not nature,
was his aspiration. And this view has more currency in Europe than in
this country. In some extreme cases it becomes what one may fairly
call the art disease. Baudelaire, for instance, as quoted by Tolstoi,
expressed a preference for a painted woman’s face over one showing
its natural color, “and for metal trees and a theatrical imitation of
water, rather than real trees and real water.” Thus does an overweening
passion for art degenerate into a love for the artificial for its own
sake. In the cultivation of letters there seems always to be a danger
that we shall come to value things, not for their own sake, but for the
literary effects that may be wrought out of them. The great artist, I
take it, is primarily in love with life and things, and not with art.
On these terms alone is his work fresh and stimulating and filled with
good arterial blood.