(_From “The Cosmopolitan” Magazine, December, 1907_)
When a man of genius who is not famous writes a notable poem he must
expect one or two of three things: indifference, indignation, ridicule.
In commending Mr. George Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry,” published in
the September number of this magazine, I had this reception of his work
in confident expectation and should have mistrusted my judgment if it
had not followed. The promptitude of the chorus of denunciation and
scorn has attested the superb character of the poet’s work and is most
gratifying.
The reason for the inevitable note of dissent is not far to seek; it
inheres in the constitution of the human mind, which is instinctively
hostile to what is “out of the common”—and a work of genius is
pretty sure to be that. It is by utterance of uncommon thoughts,
opinions, sentiments and fancies that genius is known. All distinction
is difference, unconformity. He who is as others are—whose mental
processes and manner of expression follow the familiar order—is
readily acceptable because easily intelligible to those whose narrow
intelligence, barren imagination, and meager vocabulary he shares.
“Why, that is great!” says that complacent dullard, “the average man,”
smiling approval. “I have thought that a hundred times myself!”—thereby
providing abundant evidence that it is not great, nor of any value
whatever. To “the average man” what is new is inconceivable, and what
he does not understand affronts him. And he is the first arbiter in
letters and art. In this “fierce democracie” he dominates literature
with a fat and heavy hand—a hand that is not always unfamiliar with the
critic’s pen.
In returning here to the subject of Mr. Sterling’s poem I have no
intention of expounding and explaining it to persons who know nothing
of poetry and are inaccessible to instruction. Those who, in the
amusing controversy which I unwittingly set raging round Mr. Sterling’s
name, have spoken for them are in equal mental darkness and somewhat
thicker moral, as it is my humble hope to show.
When the cause to be served is ignorance, the means of service is
invariably misrepresentation. The champion of offended Dulness
falsifies in statement and cheats in argument, for he serves a client
without a conscience. A knowledge of right and wrong is not acquired
to-day, as in the time of Adam and Eve, by eating an apple; and it is
attained by only the highest intelligences.
But before undertaking the task of pointing out the moral unworth of my
honorable opponents, it seems worth while to explain that the proponent
of the controversy has had the misfortune to misunderstand the question
at issue. He has repeatedly fallen into the error of affirming, with
all the emphasis of shouting capitals, that “Ambrose Bierce says it [“A
Wine of Wizardry”] is the greatest poem ever written in America,” and
at least once has declared that I pronounced it “the only great poem
ever written in America.” If the dispute had been prolonged I shudder
to think that his disobedient understanding might have misled him to
say that I swore it was the only great poem ever written, in all the
world.
To those who know me it is hardly needful, I hope, to explain that
I said none of the words so generously put into my mouth, for it is
obvious that I have not seen, and could not have seen, all the poems
that have been written in America. To have pronounced such a judgment
without all the evidence would have been to resemble my opponents—which
God forbid! In point of fact, I do not consider the poem the greatest
ever written in America; Mr. Sterling himself, for example, has written
a greater. Exposed to so hardy and impenitent misrepresentation I
feel a need of the consolations of religion: I should like positively
to know where my critics are going to when they die. From my present
faltering faith in their future I derive an imperfect comfort.
Naturally, not all protagonists of the commonplace who have uttered
their minds about this matter are entitled to notice. The Baseball
Reporter who, says Mr. Brisbane, “like Mr. Sterling, is a poet,” the
Sweet Singer of Slang, the Simian Lexicographer of Misinformation,
and the Queen of Platitudinaria who has renounced the sin-and-sugar
of youth for the milk-and-morality of age must try to forgive me if I
leave them grinning through their respective horse-collars to a not
unkind inattention.
But Deacon Harvey is a person of note and consequence. On a question
of poetry, I am told, he controls nearly the entire Methodist vote.
Moreover, he has a notable knack at mastery of the English language,
which he handles with no small part of the ease and grace that may have
distinguished the impenitent thief carrying his cross up the slope of
Calvary. Let the following noble sentences attest the quality of his
performance when he is at his best:
A natural hesitation to undertake analysis of the unanalyzable,
criticism of the uncriticizable, or, if we may go so far, mention
of the unmentionable, yields to your own shrewd forging of the
links of circumstance into a chain of duty. That the greatest poem
ever written on this hemisphere, having forced its way out of a
comfortable lodgment in the brain of an unknown author, should be
discovered and heralded by a connoisseur whose pre-eminence is
yet to be established, is perhaps in itself not surprising, and
yet we must admit that the mere rarity of such a happening would
ordinarily preclude the necessity, which otherwise might exist, of
searching inquiry as to the attributed transcendentalism of merit.
Surely a man who habitually writes such prose as that must be a
good judge of poetry or he would not be a good judge of anything in
literature. And what does this Prince Paramount of grace and clarity
find to condemn in poor Mr. Sterling’s poem? Listen with at least one
ear each:
We are willing to admit at the outset that in the whole range
of American, or, for that matter, English, poetry there is no
example of a poem crowded with such startling imagery, ambitiously
marshaled in lines of such lurid impressiveness, all of which at
once arrest attention and would bewilder the esthetic sensibility
of a Titan. The poem is made up of an unbroken series of
sententious and striking passages, any one of which would have
distinguished a whole canto of Dante or Keats, neither of whom
would have ventured within that limit to use more than one—such was
their niggardly economy.
Here is something “rich and strange” in criticism. Heretofore it has
been thought that “wealth of imagery” was about the highest quality
that poetry could have, but it seems not; that somewhat tiresome phrase
is to be used henceforth to signify condemnation. Of the poem that
we wish to commend we must say that it has an admirable poverty of
imagination. Deacon Harvey’s notion that poets like Dante and Keats
deliberately refrained from using more than one “sententious and
striking passage” to the canto “goes neare to be fonny.” They used as
many as occurred to them; no poet uses fewer than he can. If he has
only one to a canto, that is not economy; it is indigence.
I observe that even so good a poet and so appreciative a reader of
Mr. Sterling as Miss Ina Coolbrith has fallen into the same error as
Deacon Harvey. Of “the many pictures presented in that wondrous ‘Wine
of Wizardry,’” this accomplished woman says: “I think it is a ‘poem’—a
great poem—but one which, in my humble estimate, might have been
made even greater could its creator have permitted himself to drop a
little of what some may deem a weakening superfluity of imagery and
word-painting.”
If one is to make “pictures” in poetry one must do so by word-painting.
(I admit the hatefulness of the term “word-painting,” through overuse
of the name in praise of the prose that the thing defaces, but it seems
that we must use it here.) Only in narrative and didactic poetry,
and these are the lowest forms, can there be too much of imagery and
word-painting; in a poem essentially graphic, like the one under
consideration, they are the strength and soul of the work. “A Wine
of Wizardry” is, and was intended to be, a series, a succession, of
unrelated pictures, colored (mostly red, naturally) by what gave them
birth and being—the reflection of a sunset in a cup of ruddy wine. To
talk of too much imagery in a work of that kind is to be like Deacon
Harvey.
Imagery, that is to say, imagination, is not only the life and soul
of poetry; it is the poetry. That is what Poe had in mind doubtless,
when he contended that there could be no such thing as a long poem. He
had observed that what are called long poems consist of brief poetical
passages connected by long passages of metrical prose—_recitativo_—of
oases of green in deserts of gray. The highest flights of imagination
have always been observed to be the briefest. George Sterling has
created a new standard, another criterion. In “A Wine of Wizardry,” as
in his longer and greater poem, “The Testimony of the Suns,” there is
no _recitativo_. His imagination flies with a tireless wing. It never
comes to earth for a new spring into the sky, but like the eagle and
the albatross, sustains itself as long as he chooses that it shall.
His passages of poetry are connected by passages of poetry. In all
his work you will find no line of prose. Poets of the present and the
future may well “view with alarm” as Statesman Harvey would say—the
work that Sterling has cut out for them, the pace that he has set.
Poetry must henceforth be not only qualitative but quantitative: it
must be _all_ poetry. If wise, the critic will note the new criterion
that this bold challenge to the centuries has made mandatory. The “long
poem” has been shown to be possible; let us see if it become customary.
In affirming Mr. Sterling’s primacy among living American poets I have
no apology to offer to the many unfortunates who have written to me in
the spirit of the man who once said of another: “What! that fellow a
great man? Why, he was born right in my town!” It is humbly submitted,
however, that unless the supply of great men is exhausted they must be
born somewhere, and the fact that they are seen “close to” by their
neighbors does not supply a reasonable presumption against their
greatness. Shakspeare himself was once a local and contemporary poet,
and even Homer is known to have been born in “seven Grecian cities”
through which he “begged his bread.” Is Deacon Harvey altogether sure
that he is immune to the popular inability to understand that the time
and place of a poet’s nativity are not decisive as to his rating? He
may find a difficulty in believing that a singer of supreme excellence
was born right in _his_ country and period, but in the words that I
have quoted from him he has himself testified to the fact. To be able
to write “an unbroken series of sententious and striking passages”;
to crowd a poem, as no other in the whole range of our literature has
done, with “startling imagery” “in lines of impressiveness,” lurid or
not; to “arrest attention”; to “bewilder the Titans,” Deacon Harvey
at their head—that is about as much as the most ambitious poet could
wish to accomplish at one sitting. The ordinary harpist harping on his
Harpers’ would be a long time in doing so much. How any commentator,
having in those words conceded my entire claim, could afterward have
the hardihood to say, “The poem has no merit,” transcends the limits
of human comprehension and passes into the dark domain of literary
criticism.
Nine in ten of the poem’s critics complain of the fantastic, grotesque,
or ghastly nature of its fancies. What would these good persons
have on the subject of wizardry?—sweet and sunny pictures of rural
life?—love scenes in urban drawing-rooms?—beautiful sentiments
appropriate to young ladies’ albums?—high moral philosophy with an
“appeal” to what is “likest God within the soul”? Deacon Harvey (O, I
cannot get away from Deacon Harvey: he fascinates me!) would have “an
interpretation of vital truth.” I do not know what that is, but we have
his word for it that nothing else is poetry. And no less a personage
than Mrs. Gertrude Atherton demands, instead of wizardry, an epic of
prehistoric California, or an account of the great fire, preferably
in prose, for, “this is not an age of poetry, anyway.” Alas, poor
Sterling!—damned alike for what he wrote and what he didn’t write.
Truly, there are persons whom one may not hope to please.
It should in fairness be said that Mrs. Atherton confesses herself no
critic of poetry—the only person, apparently, who is not—but pronounces
Mr. Sterling a “recluse” who “needs to see more and read less.” From a
pretty long acquaintance with him I should say that this middle-aged
man o’ the world is as little “reclusive” as any one that I know, and
has seen rather more of life than is good for him. And I doubt if
he would greatly gain in mental stature by unreading Mrs. Atherton’s
excellent novels.
Sterling’s critics are not the only persons who seem a bit blinded
by the light of his genius: Mr. Joaquin Miller, a born poet and as
great-hearted a man as ever lived, is not quite able to “place” him.
He says that this “titanic, magnificent” poem is “classic” “in the
Homeric, the Miltonic sense.” “A Wine of Wizardry” is not “classic” in
the sense in which scholars use that word. It is all color and fire and
movement, with nothing of the cold simplicity and repose of the Grecian
ideal. Nor is it Homeric, nor in the Miltonic vein. It is in no vein
but the author’s own; in the entire work is only one line suggesting
the manner of another poet—the last in this passage:
Who leads from hell his whitest queens, arrayed
In chains so heated at their master’s fire
That one new-damned had thought their bright attire
Indeed were coral, till the dazzling dance
So terribly that brilliance shall enhance.
That line, the least admirable in the poem, is purely Byronic. Possibly
Mr. Miller meant that Sterling’s work is like Homer’s and Milton’s,
not in manner, but in excellence; and it is.
Mr. Sterling’s critics may at least claim credit for candor. For cause
of action, as the lawyers say, they aver his use of strange, unfamiliar
words. Now this is a charge that any man should be ashamed to make;
first, because it is untrue; second, because it is a confession of
ignorance. There are not a half-dozen words in the poem that are not in
common use by good authors, and none that any man should not blush to
say that he does not understand. The objection amounts to this: that
the poet did not write down to the objector’s educational level—did not
adapt his work to “the meanest capacity.” Under what obligation was he
to do so? There are men whose vocabulary does not exceed a few hundreds
of words; they know not the meaning of the others because they have
not the thoughts that the others express. Shall these Toms, Dicks and
Harrys of the slums and cornfields set up their meager acquirements
as metes and bounds beyond which a writer shall not go? Let them stay
upon their reservations. There are poets enough, great poets, too, whom
they can partly understand; that is, they can understand the simple
language, the rhymes, the meter—everything but the poetry. There
are orders of poetry, as there are orders of architecture. Because a
Grecian temple is beautiful shall there be no Gothic cathedrals? By the
way, it is not without significance that Gothic architecture was first
so called in derision, the Goths having no architecture. It was named
by the Deacon Harveys of the period.
The passage that has provoked this class of critics to the most
shameless feats of self-exposure is this:
Infernal rubrics, sung to Satan’s might,
Or chanted to the Dragon in his gyre.
Upon this they have expended all the powers of ridicule belonging to
those who respect nothing because they know nothing. A person of light
and leading in their bright band[2] says of it:
“We confess that we had never before heard of a ‘gyre.’ Looking it up
in the dictionary, we find that it means a gyration, or a whirling
round. Rubrics chanted to a dragon while he was whirling ought to be
worth hearing.”
Now, whose fault is it that this distinguished journalist had never
heard of a gyre? Certainly not the poet’s. And whose that in very
sensibly looking it up he suffered himself to be so misled by the
lexicographer as to think it a gyration, a whirling round? Gyre means,
not a gyration, but the path of a gyration, an orbit. And has the poor
man no knowledge of a dragon in the heavens?—the constellation Draco,
to which, as to other stars, the magicians of old chanted incantations?
A peasant is not to be censured for his ignorance, but when he glories
in it and draws its limit as a dead line for his betters he is the
least pleasing of all the beasts of the field.
An amusing instance of the commonplace mind’s inability to understand
anything having a touch of imagination is found in a criticism of the
now famous lines:
The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast,
Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.
“Somehow,” says the critic, who, naturally, is a book-reviewer, “one
does not associate blue eyes with a vampire.” Of course it did not
occur to him that this was doubtless the very reason why the author
chose the epithet—if he thought of anybody’s conception but his own.
“Blue-eyed” connotes beauty and gentleness; the picture is that of
a lovely, fair-haired woman with the telltale blood about her lips.
Nothing could be less horrible; nothing more terrible. As vampires do
not really exist, everyone is at liberty, I take it, to conceive them
under what outward and visible aspect he will; but this gentleman,
having standardized the vampire, naturally resents any departure from
the type—his type. I fancy he requires goggle-eyes, emitting flame and
perhaps smoke, a mouth well garnished with tusks—long claws, and all
the other appurtenances that make the conventional Chinese dragon so
awful that one naturally wishes to meet it and kick it.
Between my mind and the minds of those whom Mr. Sterling’s daring
incursions into the realm of the unreal do not affect with a keen
artistic delight there is nothing in common—except a part of my
vocabulary. I cannot hope to convince nor persuade them. Nevertheless,
it is no trouble to point out that their loud pretense of being
“shocked” by some of his fancies is a singularly foolish one. We
are not shocked by the tragic, the terrible, even the ghastly, in
literature and art. We do not flee from the theater when a tragedy is
enacting—the murder of Duncan and the sleeping grooms—the stabbing and
poisoning in “Hamlet.” We listen without discomposure to the beating
to death of Nancy Sykes behind the scenes. The Ancient Mariner’s dead
comrades rise and pull at the ropes without disturbing the reader;
even the “slimy things” “crawl with legs upon a slimy sea” and we do
not pitch the book into the fire. Dante’s underworld, with all its
ingenious horrors, page after page of them, are accounted pretty good
reading—at least Dante is accounted a pretty good poet. No one stands
forth to affirm his distress when Homer’s hero declares that
Swarms of specters rose from deepest hell
With bloodless visage and with hideous yell.
They scream, they shriek; sad groans and dismal sounds
Stun my scared ears and pierce Hell’s utmost bounds.
Literature is full of pictures of the terrible, the awful, the ghastly,
if you please; hardly a great author but has given them to us in prose
or verse. They shock nobody, for they produce no illusion, not even on
the stage, or the canvases of Vereshchagin. If they did they would be
without artistic value.
But it is the fashion to pretend to be horrified—when the terrible
thing is new and by an unfamiliar hand. The Philistine who accepts
without question the horrors of Dante’s Hell professes himself greatly
agitated when Sterling’s
Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,
Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed.
In point of fact, the poor Philistine himself yawns as he reads
about it; he is not shocked at all. It is comprehensible how there
may be such a thing as a mollycoddle, but how one can pretend to
be a mollycoddle when one is not—that must be accepted as the most
surprising hypocrisy that we have the happiness to know about.
Having affirmed the greatness of Mr. Sterling, I am austerely reminded
by a half hundred commentators, some of whom profess admiration for “A
Wine of Wizardry,” that a single poem, of whatever excellence, does
not establish the claim. Like nearly all the others, these gentlemen
write without accuracy, from a general impression. They overlook the
circumstance that I pointed out a book by Sterling, published several
years ago, entitled _The Testimony of the Suns, and Other Poems_.
What, then, becomes of the “single poem” sneer? To its performers
nothing that they have not seen exists.
That book is dedicated to me—a fact that has been eagerly seized
upon by still another class of critics to “explain” my good opinion
of its author; for nothing is so welcome to our literary hill-tribes
as a chance to cheat by ascription of a foul motive. But it happens,
unhappily for the prosperity of their hope, that the dedication was
made in gratitude for my having already set the crown of praise upon
its author’s head. I will quote the first lines of the dedication, not
only in proof of this, but to show the noble seriousness and sincerity
with which a great poet regards his ministry at the altar of his art:
Ah! glad to thy decree I bow,
From whose unquestioned hand did fall,
Beyond a lesser to recall,
The solemn laurels on my brow.
I tremble with the splendid weight.
To my unworth ’tis given to know
How dread the charge I undergo
Who claim the holy Muse as mate.
It is to be hoped that Mr. Sterling’s reverent attitude toward his art
has suffered no abatement from his having been thrown to the swine for
allegiance to an alien faith hateful to his countrymen.
[2] Mr. Arthur Brisbane.