The one new thing in the world in our day is democracy, the coming
forward of the people, and that which has grown out of it, or which
goes along with it,--science, free inquiry, the industrial system,
the humanitarian spirit. The old and past world from which we inherit
our literary tastes and standards was characterized by a condition
of things quite different,--the supremacy of the few, the leadership
of the hero, the strong man,--the picturesque age that gave us art,
theology, philosophy, and the great epic poems. It was the youth of
the race. Mankind seems now fast nearing its majority. The bewitching,
the delusive, the unreasoning, pathetic time of youth is past. What
the man loses and what he gains in passing from youth to manhood the
race has lost and has gained in passing from the age of myth to the
age of science. A charm, an innocence, a susceptibility, a credulity,
and many other things are gone; a seriousness, a reasonableness,
a width of outlook, power to deal with real things, sanity, and
self-control, have come. Youth is cruel, age is kind and considerate.
All forms, ceremonies, titles, all conferred dignities and arbitrary
distinctions, all pomp and circumstance, count for less and less
in the world. Art is less and less; nature is more and more. The
extrinsic, the put on, the ornamental, the factitious, count for
less and less; theology, metaphysics, the sacredness of priests, the
divinity of kings, count for less and less, while the real, the true,
the essential, in all fields, count for more. It is doubtful if art
for art’s sake can ever be in the future what it has been in the past.
We are too deeply absorbed in the reality; we care less and less for
the symbol and more and more for the thing symbolized. The monarchical
idea is dwindling; the throne as a symbol has lost its force; the old
religious language of supplication and praise begins to have a hollow,
archaic sound. The idea of the fatherhood of God is fast taking the
place of the idea of the despotism of God. It has taken mankind all
these centuries to rise to the conception of a being with whom the
language of excessive flattery and adulation seems out of place. The
democratic idea will eventually penetrate and modify our religious
notions. We shall no longer seek to propitiate an offended deity by
groveling in the dust before an imaginary throne. The despot goes out,
the Brother comes in. All these things and many more cluster around the
word democracy.
What is the import of the word as applied to literature? How far
will it carry in this field? Is the democratic movement favorable or
unfavorable to the growth of true literature? It has been often said
that literature is essentially aristocratic; that is, I suppose, that
it implies a degree of excellence, a kind of excellence, quite beyond
the appreciation of the masses. This is no doubt in a measure true,
and always has been true. While the mass of the people are not good
offhand judges of the best literature, it is equally true that great
literature--literature that has breadth and power, like the English
Bible or like Bunyan, and many other books that transcend the sphere
of mere letters--makes its way more or less among the people. The
highest ideals in any sphere can never draw the many; yet the few, the
elect who are drawn by them, are probably just as sure to appear in a
democracy as in an oligarchy.
To some readers democracy in literature seems to suggest only an
incursion of the loud, the vulgar, the cheap and meretricious.
Apparently it suggests only these things to Mr. Edmund Gosse, whose
volume “Questions at Issue” contains an essay upon this subject.
Mr. Gosse congratulates the guild of letters that the summits of
literature have not yet been submerged by the flood of democracy. The
standards have not been lowered in obedience to the popular taste.
But Mr. Gosse thinks the social revolution or evolution now imminent
will require a new species of poetry, that this poetry will be
democratic to a degree at present unimaginable, though just what it
is to be democratic in poetry is not very clear to him. He says:
“The aristocratic tradition is still paramount in all art. Kings,
princesses, and the symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as
we now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales,” and he does not
see what will be left if this romantic phraseology is done away with.
We shall certainly have left what we had before these types and symbols
came into vogue,--nature, life, man, God. If out of these things we
cannot supply ourselves with new types and values, then certainly we
shall be hard put.
The critic cites the popularity of Tennyson as an illustration of the
influence of literature upon democracy rather than of democracy upon
literature. It is true that Tennyson was not begotten by the democratic
spirit, but by the old feudal spirit; to him the people was but a
hundred-headed beast, and his temper toward this beast, if reports
are true, was anything but democratic. Tennyson was of the haughty,
exclusive, lordly Norman spirit, and his popularity simply showed
how widespread the appreciation of literary excellence may become in
democratic times.
Of course universal suffrage is of slight import in literature: not
by the vote of the many, but by the judgment of the few, are the true
standards upheld. The novels that sell by the hundred thousand will not
be the best, or even the second or third best, and their great vogue
only indicates that the diffusion of education has enormously enlarged
the reading public, and that in democratic times, as in all other
times, there never has been and probably never will be enough good
taste to go around.
Democracy, as it affects, or should affect, literature, no more means
a lowering of the standard of excellence than it means a lowering of
the standards in science, or in art, or in farming or engineering or
ship-building, or in the art of living itself. It means a lifting up
of the average, with the great prizes, the high ideals, as attractive
and as difficult as ever. Because the people are crude and run for
the moment after the cheap and meretricious, we are not therefore
to infer that the cheap and meretricious will permanently content
them. Democracy in literature, as exemplified by the two great modern
democrats in letters, Whitman and Tolstoi, means a new and more deeply
religious way of looking at mankind, as well as at all the facts and
objects of the visible world. It means, furthermore, the finding of
new artistic motives and values in the people, in science and the
modern spirit, in liberty, fraternity, equality, in the materialism and
industrialism of man’s life as we know it in our day and land,--the
carrying into imaginative fields the quality of common humanity, that
which it shares with real things and with all open-air nature, with
hunters, farmers, sailors, and real workers in all fields.
The typical democratic poet will hold and wield his literary and
artistic endowment as a common, everyday man, the brother and equal
of all, and never for a moment as the man of exceptional parts and
advantages, exclusive and aloof. His poems will imply a great body of
humanity--the masses, the toilers--and will carry into emotional and
ideal fields the atmosphere of these.
Behold the artistic motives furnished by feudalism, by royalty, by
lords and ladies, by the fears and superstitions of the past, by
mythology and ecclesiasticism, by religious and political terrorism
in all their manifold forms. Art and literature have lived upon these
things for ages. Can democracy, can the worth and picturesqueness
of the people, furnish no worthy themes and motives for the poets?
Can science, can the present day, can the religion of humanity, the
conquest of nature’s forces, inspire no poetic enthusiasm and give
rise to great art rivaling that of the past? As between the past and
the present, undoubtedly the difficulty is not in the poverty of the
material of to-day, but in the inadequacy of the man. It requires a
great spirit, a powerful personality, to master and absorb the diverse
and complex elements of our time and imbue them with poetic enthusiasm.
The humanitarian enthusiasm as a _motif_ in literature and art,--the
inspiration begotten by the contemplation of the wrongs, the
sufferings, and the hopes of the people,--undoubtedly came in with
democracy. It was quite unknown to the ancient and to the feudal world.
To all the more vital voices of our time this enthusiasm gives the
tone. How pronounced it is in two of our latest and most promising
poets, Mr. Edwin Markham and Mr. William Vaughn Moody!
It is hard to shake off the conviction that the old order of things had
the advantage of picturesqueness. Is it because it is so hard to free
ourselves from the illusions of time and distance? Charm, enticement,
dwell with the remote, the unfamiliar. The now, the here, are vulgar
and commonplace. We find it hard to realize that the great deeds were
done on just such a day as this, and that the actors in them were just
such men as we see about us. Then the days of one’s youth seem strange
and incredible; how different their light from this hard, prosy glare!
Our distrust of our own day and land as furnishing suitable material
for poetry and romance doubtless springs largely from this illusion.
At the same time, a mechanical and industrial age like ours no doubt
offers a harder problem to the imaginative producer than the ages of
faith and fanaticism of the past. The steam whistle, the type of our
civilization, what can the poet make of it? The clank of machinery,
it must be confessed, is less inspiring than the clash of arms; the
railroad is less pleasing to look upon than the highway, because it
is more arbitrary and mechanical. In the same way, the steamship
seems unrelated to the great forces and currents of the globe. Yet to
put these things in poetry only requires time, only requires a more
complete adjustment of our lives to them, and hence the proper vista
and association. As is always the case, it is a question of the man and
not of the material. Goethe said to Eckermann, “Our German æsthetical
people are always talking about poetical and unpoetical objects,
and in one respect they are not quite wrong; yet at bottom no real
object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly,”--if
he can throw enough feeling into it. I lately read a poem by one of
our younger poets on an entirely modern theme, the building of the
railroad,--the gang of men cutting through hills, tunneling mountains,
filling valleys, bridging chasms, etc. But, though vividly described,
it did not quite reach the poetical; it lacked the personal and the
human; it was realistic without the freeing touch of the idealistic.
Some story, some interest, some enthusiasm overarching it, would have
supplied an atmosphere that was lacking. We cannot be permanently
interested in the gigantic or in sheer brute power unless they are in
some way related to life and its aspirations. The battle of man with
man is more interesting than the battle of man with rocks and chasms,
because men can strike back, and victory is not to be had on such easy
terms.
The same objection cannot be urged against Mr. William Vaughn Moody’s
poem on the steam engine, which he treats under the figure of “The
Brute,”--a poem of great imaginative power in which the human interest
is constantly paramount. The still small voice of humanity is always
heard through the Brute’s roar, as may be seen in the first stanza:--
“Through his might men work their wills;
They have boweled out the hills
For food to keep him toiling in the cages they have wrought;
And they fling him hour by hour
Limbs of men to give him power.
Brains of men to give him cunning; and for dainties to devour
Children’s souls, the little worth; hearts of women, cheaply bought.
He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them scanty thought.”
Quite different is the treatment of “The Lightning Express” by a
western poet, Mr. J. P. Irvine, yet the poetic note is clearly and
surely struck in his stanzas too:--
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“In storm and darkness, night and day,
Through mountain gorge or level way,
With lightening rein and might unspent,
And head erect in scorn of space,
Holds, neck-and-neck, with time a race,
Flame-girt across a continent.
Think not of danger; every wheel
Of all that clank and roll below
Rings singing answers, steel for steel,
Beneath the hammer’s testing blow;
And what though fields go swirling round,
And backward swims the mazy ground,
So swift the herds seem standing still,
As scared they dash from hill to hill;
And though the brakes may grind to fire
The gravel as they grip the tire
And holding, strike a startling vein
Of tremor through the surging train,
The hand of him who guides the rein
Is all-controlling and intent;
Fear not, although the race you ride
Is on the whirlwind, side by side,
With time across a continent.”
What are the sources of the interesting in life? Novelty is one, but
it is short-lived; beauty and sublimity are others, and are more
lasting. But the main source of the interesting is human association.
The landscape that is written over with human history, how it holds
us and draws us! All phases of modern industrial life--the miner,
the lumberman, the road-builder, the engineer, the factory-hand, are
available for poetic treatment to him who can bring the proper fund
of human association, who can make the human element in these things
paramount over the mechanical element. The more of nature you get in,
the more the picture has a background of earth and sky, or of great
human passions and heroisms, the more the imagination is warmed and
moved. The railroad is itself a blotch upon the earth, but it has a
mighty background. In itself it is at war with every feature of the
landscape it passes through; it stains the snows, it befouls the water,
it poisons the air, it smuts the grass and the foliage, it expels the
peace and the quiet, it puts to rout every rural divinity. It adapts
itself to nothing; it is as arbitrary as a cyclone and as killing as a
pestilence. Yet a train of cars thundering through storm and darkness,
racing with winds and clouds, is a sublime object to contemplate; it
is sublime because of its triumph over time and space, and because of
the danger and dread that compass it about. It has a tremendous human
background. The body-killing and soul-blighting occupations peculiar to
our civilization are not of themselves suggestive of poetic thoughts;
but if Dante made poetry out of hell, would not a nature copious and
powerful enough make poetry out of the vast and varied elements of our
materialistic civilization?