me, symbolizes the whole speculation of this laborious and humorless
pedagogue. From end to end you will find the same tedious torturing of
plain facts, the same relentless piling up of thin and over-labored
theory, the same flatulent bombast, the same intellectual strabismus.
And always with an air of vast importance, always in vexed and
formidable sentences, always in the longest words possible, always in
the most cacophonous English that even a professor ever wrote. One
visualizes him with his head thrown back, searching for cryptic answers
in the firmament and not seeing the overt and disconcerting cow, not
watching his step. One sees him as the pundit _par excellence_,
infinitely earnest and diligent, infinitely honest and patient, but also
infinitely humorless, futile and hollow....
So much, at least for the present, for this Prof. Dr. Thorstein Veblen,
head Great Thinker to the parlor radicals, Socrates of the intellectual
Greenwich Village, chief star (at least transiently) of the American
_Athenæums_. I am tempted to crowd in mention of some of his other
astounding theories—for example, the theory that the presence of pupils,
the labor of teaching, a concern with pedagogy, is necessary to the
highest functioning of a scientific investigator—a notion magnificently
supported by the examples of Flexner, Ehrlich, Metchnikoff, Loeb and
Carrel! I am tempted, too, to devote a thirdly to the astounding
materialism, almost the downright hoggishness, of his whole system—its
absolute exclusion of everything approaching an æsthetic motive. But I
must leave all these fallacies and absurdities to your own inquiry. More
important than any of them, more important as a phenomenon than the
professor himself and all his works, is the gravity with which his
muddled and highly dubious ideas have been received. At the moment, I
daresay, he is in decline; such Great Thinkers have a way of going out
as quickly as they come in. But a year or so ago he dominated the
American scene. All the reviews were full of his ideas. A hundred lesser
sages reflected them. Every one of intellectual pretentions read his
books. Veblenism was shining in full brilliance. There were Veblenists,
Veblen clubs, Veblen remedies for all the sorrows of the world. There
were even, in Chicago, Veblen Girls—perhaps Gibson girls grown
middle-aged and despairing.
The spectacle, unluckily, was not novel. Go back through the history of
America since the early nineties, and you will find a long succession of
just such violent and uncritical enthusiasms. James had his day; Dewey
had his day; Ibsen had his day; Maeterlinck had his day. Almost every
year sees another intellectual Munyon arise, with his infallible peruna
for all the current malaises. Sometimes this Great Thinker is imported.
Once he was Pastor Wagner; once he was Bergson; once he was Eucken; once
he was Tolstoi; once he was a lady, by name Ellen Key; again he was
another lady, Signorina Montessori. But more often he is of native
growth, and full of the pervasive cocksureness and superficiality of the
land. I do not rank Dr. Veblen among the worst of these haruspices, save
perhaps as a stylist; I am actually convinced that he belongs among the
best of them. But that best is surely depressing enough. What lies
behind it is the besetting intellectual sin of the United States—the
habit of turning intellectual concepts into emotional concepts, the vice
of orgiastic and inflammatory thinking. There is, in America, no orderly
and thorough working out of the fundamental problems of our society;
there is only, as one Englishman has said, an eternal combat of crazes.
The things of capital importance are habitually discussed, not by men
soberly trying to get at the truth about them, but by brummagem Great
Thinkers trying only to get _kudos_ out of them. We are beset endlessly
by quacks—and they are not the less quacks when they happen to be quite
honest. In all fields, from politics to pedagogics and from theology to
public hygiene, there is a constant emotional obscuration of the true
issues, a violent combat of credulities, an inane debasement of
scientific curiosity to the level of mob gaping.
The thing to blame, of course, is our lack of an intellectual
aristocracy—sound in its information, skeptical in its habit of mind,
and, above all, secure in its position and authority. Every other
civilized country has such an aristocracy. It is the natural corrective
of enthusiasms from below. It is hospitable to ideas, but as adamant
against crazes. It stands against the pollution of logic by emotion, the
sophistication of evidence to the glory of God. But in America there is
nothing of the sort. On the one hand there is the populace—perhaps more
powerful here, more capable of putting its idiotic ideas into execution,
than anywhere else—and surely more eager to follow platitudinous
messiahs. On the other hand there is the ruling plutocracy—ignorant,
hostile to inquiry, tyrannical in the exercise of its power, suspicious
of ideas of whatever sort. In the middle ground there is little save an
indistinct herd of intellectual eunuchs, chiefly professors—often quite
as stupid as the plutocracy and always in great fear of it. When it
produces a stray rebel he goes over to the mob; there is no place for
him within his own order. This feeble and vacillating class, unorganized
and without authority, is responsible for what passes as the
well-informed opinion of the country—for the sort of opinion that one
encounters in the serious periodicals—for what later on leaks down, much
diluted, into the few newspapers that are not frankly imbecile. Dr.
Veblen has himself described it in “The Higher Learning in America”; he
is one of its characteristic products, and he proves that he is
thoroughly of it by the timorousness he shows in that book. It is, in
the main, only half-educated. It lacks experience of the world,
assurance, the consciousness of class solidarity and security. Of no
definite position in our national life, exposed alike to the clamors of
the mob and the discipline of the plutocracy, it gets no public respect
and is deficient in self-respect. Thus the better sort of men are not
tempted to enter it. It recruits only men of feeble courage, men of
small originality. Its sublimest flower is the American college
president, well described by Dr. Veblen—a perambulating sycophant and
platitudinarian, a gaudy mendicant and bounder, engaged all his life,
not in the battle of ideas, the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge,
but in the courting of rich donkeys and the entertainment of mobs....
Nay, Veblen is not the worst. Veblen is almost the best. The worst
is—but I begin to grow indignant, and indignation, as old Friedrich used
to say, is foreign to my nature.
VI. THE NEW POETRY MOVEMENT
The current pother about poetry, now gradually subsiding, seems to have
begun about seven years ago—say in 1912. It was during that year that
Harriet Monroe established _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, in Chicago,
and ever since then she has been the mother superior of the movement.
Other leaders have occasionally disputed her command—the bombastic
Braithwaite, with his annual anthology of magazine verse; Amy Lowell,
with her solemn pronunciamentos in the manner of a Harvard professor;
Vachel Lindsay, with his nebulous vaporings and chautauqua posturings;
even such cheap jacks as Alfred Kreymborg, out of Greenwich Village. But
the importance of Miss Monroe grows more manifest as year chases year.
She was, to begin with, clearly the pioneer. _Poetry_ was on the stands
nearly two years before the first Braithwaite anthology, and long before
Miss Lowell had been lured from her earlier finishing-school doggerels
by the Franco-British Imagists. It antedated, too, all the other salient
documents of the movement—Master’s “Spoon River Anthology,” Frost’s
“North of Boston,” Lindsay’s “General William Booth Enters Heaven,” the
historic bulls of the Imagists, the frantic balderdash of the “Others”
group. Moreover, Miss Monroe has always managed to keep on good terms
with all wings of the heaven-kissed host, and has thus managed to exert
a ponderable influence both to starboard and to port. This, I daresay,
is because she is a very intelligent woman, which fact is alone
sufficient to give her an austere eminence in a movement so beset by
mountebanks and their dupes. I have read _Poetry_ since the first
number, and find it constantly entertaining. It has printed a great deal
of extravagant stuff, and not a little downright nonsensical stuff, but
in the main it has steered a safe and intelligible course, with no
salient blunders. No other poetry magazine—and there have been dozens of
them—has even remotely approached it in interest, or, for that matter,
in genuine hospitality to ideas. Practically all of the others have been
operated by passionate enthusiasts, often extremely ignorant and always
narrow and humorless. But Miss Monroe has managed to retain a certain
judicial calm in the midst of all the whooping and clapper-clawing, and
so she has avoided running amuck, and her magazine has printed the very
best of the new poetry and avoided much of the worst.
As I say, the movement shows signs of having spent its strength. The
mere bulk of the verse that it produces is a great deal less than it was
three or four years ago, or even one or two years ago, and there is a
noticeable tendency toward the conservatism once so loftily disdained. I
daresay the Knish-Morgan burlesque of Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison
Ficke was a hard blow to the more fantastic radicals. At all events,
they subsided after it was perpetrated, and for a couple of years
nothing has been heard from them. These radicals, chiefly collected in
what was called the “Others” group, rattled the slapstick in a sort of
side-show to the main exhibition. They attracted, of course, all the
more credulous and uninformed partisans of the movement, and not a few
advanced professors out of one-building universities began to lecture
upon them before bucolic women’s clubs. They committed hari-kari in the
end by beginning to believe in their own buncombe. When their leaders
took to the chautauquas and sought to convince the peasantry that James
Whitcomb Riley was a fraud the time was ripe for the lethal buffoonery
of MM. Bynner and Ficke. That buffoonery was enormously
successful—perhaps the best hoax in American literary history. It was
swallowed, indeed, by so many magnificoes that it made criticism very
timorous thereafter, and so did damage to not a few quite honest bards.
To-day a new poet, if he departs ever so little from the path already
beaten, is kept in a sort of literary delousing pen until it is
established that he is genuinely sincere, and not merely another Bynner
in hempen whiskers and a cloak to go invisible.
Well, what is the net produce of the whole uproar? How much actual
poetry have all these truculent rebels against Stedman’s Anthology and
McGuffey’s Sixth Reader manufactured? I suppose I have read nearly all
of it—a great deal of it, as a magazine editor, in manuscript—and yet,
as I look back, my memory is lighted up by very few flashes of any
lasting brilliance. The best of all the lutists of the new school, I am
inclined to think, are Carl Sandburg and James Oppenheim, and
particularly Sandburg. He shows a great deal of raucous crudity, he is
often a bit uncertain and wobbly, and sometimes he is downright
banal—but, taking one bard with another, he is probably the soundest and
most intriguing of the lot. Compare, for example, his war poems—simple,
eloquent and extraordinarily moving—to the humorless balderdash of Amy
Lowell, or, to go outside the movement, to the childish gush of Joyce
Kilmer, Hermann Hagedorn and Charles Hanson Towne. Often he gets
memorable effects by astonishingly austere means, as in his famous
“Chicago” rhapsody and his “Cool Tombs.” And always he is thoroughly
individual, a true original, his own man. Oppenheim, equally eloquent,
is more conventional. He stands, as to one leg, on the shoulders of Walt
Whitman, and, as to the other, on a stack of Old Testaments. The stuff
he writes, despite his belief to the contrary, is not American at all;
it is absolutely Jewish, Levantine, almost Asiatic. But here is
something criticism too often forgets: the Jew, intrinsically, is the
greatest of poets. Beside his gorgeous rhapsodies the highest flights of
any western bard seem feeble and cerebral. Oppenheim, inhabiting a brick
house in New York, manages to get that sonorous Eastern note into his
dithyrambs. They are often inchoate and feverish, but at their best they
have the gigantic gusto of Solomon’s Song.
Miss Lowell is the schoolmarm of the movement, and vastly more the
pedagogue than the artist. She has written perhaps half a dozen
excellent pieces in imitation of Richard Aldington and John Gould
Fletcher, and a great deal of highfalutin bathos. Her “A Dome of
Many-Colored Glass” is full of infantile poppycock, and though it is
true that it was first printed in 1912, before she joined the Imagists,
it is not to be forgotten that it was reprinted with her consent in
1915, after she had definitely set up shop as a foe of the _cliché_. Her
celebrity, I fancy, is largely extra-poetical; if she were Miss Tilly
Jones, of Fort Smith, Ark., there would be a great deal less rowing
about her, and her successive masterpieces would be received less
gravely. A literary craftsman in America, as I have already said once or
twice, is never judged by his work alone. Miss Lowell has been helped
very much by her excellent social position. The majority, and perhaps
fully nine-tenths of the revolutionary poets are of no social position
at all—newspaper reporters, Jews, foreigners of vague nationality,
school teachers, lawyers, advertisement writers, itinerant lecturers,
Greenwich Village posturers, and so on. I have a suspicion that it has
subtly flattered such denizens of the _demi-monde_ to find the sister of
a president of Harvard in their midst, and that their delight has
materially corrupted their faculties. Miss Lowell’s book of exposition,
“Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,” is commonplace to the last
degree. Louis Untermeyer’s “The New Era in American Poetry” is very much
better. And so is Prof. Dr. John Livingston Lowes’ “Convention and
Revolt in Poetry.”
As for Edgar Lee Masters, for a short season the undisputed Homer of the
movement, I believe that he is already extinct. What made the fame of
“The Spoon River Anthology” was not chiefly any great show of novelty in
it, nor any extraordinary poignancy, nor any grim truthfulness
unparalleled, but simply the public notion that it was improper. It fell
upon the country at the height of the last sex wave—a wave eternally
ebbing and flowing, now high, now low. It was read, not as work of art,
but as document; its large circulation was undoubtedly mainly among
persons to whom poetry _qua_ poetry was as sour a dose as symphonic
music. To such persons, of course, it seemed something new under the
sun. They were unacquainted with the verse of George Crabbe; they were
quite innocent of E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost; they knew nothing of
the _Ubi sunt_ formula; they had never heard of the Greek Anthology. The
roar of his popular success won Masters’ case with the critics. His
undoubted merits in detail—his half-wistful cynicism, his capacity for
evoking simple emotions, his deft skill at managing the puny
difficulties of _vers libre_—were thereupon pumped up to such an extent
that his defects were lost sight of. Those defects, however, shine
blindingly in his later books. Without the advantage of content that
went with the anthology, they reveal themselves as volumes of empty
doggerel, with now and then a brief moment of illumination. It would be
difficult, indeed, to find poetry that is, in essence, less poetical.
Most of the pieces are actually tracts, and many of them are very bad
tracts.
Lindsay? Alas, he has done his own burlesque. What was new in him, at
the start, was an echo of the barbaric rhythms of the Jubilee Songs. But
very soon the thing ceased to be a marvel, and of late his elephantine
college yells have ceased to be amusing. His retirement to the
chautauquas is self-criticism of uncommon penetration. Frost? A standard
New England poet, with a few changes in phraseology, and the
substitution of sour resignationism for sweet resignationism. Whittier
without the whiskers. Robinson? Ditto, but with a politer bow. He has
written sound poetry, but not much of it. The late Major-General
Roosevelt ruined him by praising him, as he ruined Henry Bordeaux,
Pastor Wagner, Francis Warrington Dawson and many another. Giovannitti?
A forth-rate Sandburg. Ezra Pound? The American in headlong flight from
America—to England, to Italy, to the Middle Ages, to ancient Greece, to
Cathay and points East. Pound, it seems to me, is the most picturesque
man in the whole movement—a professor turned fantee, Abelard in grand
opera. His knowledge is abysmal; he has it readily on tap; moreover, he
has a fine ear, and has written many an excellent verse. But now all the
glow and gusto of the bard have been transformed into the rage of the
pamphleteer: he drops the lute for the bayonet. One sympathizes with him
in his choler. The stupidity he combats is actually almost unbearable.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist
the black flag, and begin slitting throats. But this business, alas, is
fatal to the placid moods and fine other-worldliness of the poet. Pound
gives a thrilling show, but—.... The remaining stars of the liberation
need not detain us. They are the street-boys following the calliope.
They have labored with diligence, but they have produced no poetry....
Miss Monroe, if she would write a book about it, would be the most
competent historian of the movement, and perhaps also its keenest
critic. She has seen it from the inside. She knows precisely what it is
about. She is able, finally, to detach herself from its extravagances,
and to estimate its opponents without bile. Her failure to do a volume
about it leaves Untermeyer’s “The New Era in American Poetry” the best
in the field. Prof. Dr. Lowes’ treatise is very much more thorough, but
it has the defect of stopping with the fundamentals—it has too little to
say about specific poets. Untermeyer discusses all of them, and then
throws in a dozen or two orthodox bards, wholly untouched by Bolshevism,
for good measure. His criticism is often trenchant and always very
clear. He thinks he knows what he thinks he knows, and he states it with
the utmost address—sometimes, indeed, as in the case of Pound, with a
good deal more address than its essential accuracy deserves. But the
messianic note that gets into the bulls and ukases of Pound himself, the
profound solemnity of Miss Lowell, the windy chautauqua-like nothings of
Lindsay, the contradictions of the Imagists, the puerilities of
Kreymborg _et al_—all these things are happily absent. And so it is
possible to follow him amiably even when he is palpably wrong.
That is not seldom. At the very start, for example, he permits himself a
lot of highly dubious rumble-bumble about the “inherent Americanism” and
soaring democracy of the movement. “Once,” he says, “the most exclusive
and aristocratic of the arts, appreciated and fostered only by little
_salons_ and erudite groups, poetry has suddenly swung away from its
self-imposed strictures and is expressing itself once more in terms of
democracy.” Pondering excessively, I can think of nothing that would be
more untrue than this. The fact is that the new poetry is neither
American nor democratic. Despite its remote grounding on Whitman, it
started, not in the United States at all, but in France, and its exotic
color is still its most salient characteristic. Practically every one of
its practitioners is palpably under some strong foreign influence, and
most of them are no more Anglo-Saxon than a samovar or a toccata. The
deliberate strangeness of Pound, his almost fanatical anti-Americanism,
is a mere accentuation of what is in every other member of the
fraternity. Many of them, like Frost, Fletcher, H. D. and Pound, have
exiled themselves from the republic. Others, such as Oppenheim,
Sandburg, Giovannitti, Benét and Untermeyer himself, are palpably
Continental Europeans, often with Levantine traces. Yet others, such as
Miss Lowell and Masters, are little more, at their best, than
translators and adapters—from the French, from the Japanese, from the
Greek. Even Lindsay, superficially the most national of them all, has
also his exotic smear, as I have shown. Let Miss Lowell herself be a
witness. “We shall see them,” she says at the opening of her essay on E.
A. Robinson, “ceding more and more to the influence of other, alien,
peoples....” A glance is sufficient to show the correctness of this
observation. There is no more “inherent Americanism” in the new poetry
than there is in the new American painting and music. It lies, in fact,
quite outside the main stream of American culture.
Nor is it democratic, in any intelligible sense. The poetry of Whittier
and Longfellow was democratic. It voiced the elemental emotions of the
masses of the people; it was full of their simple, rubber-stamp ideas;
they comprehended it and cherished it. And so with the poetry of James
Whitcomb Riley, and with that of Walt Mason and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. But
the new poetry, grounded firmly upon novelty of form and boldness of
idea, is quite beyond their understanding. It seems to them to be
idiotic, just as the poetry of Whitman seemed to them to be idiotic, and
if they could summon up enough interest in it to examine it at length
they would undoubtedly clamor for laws making the confection of it a
felony. The mistake of Untermeyer, and of others who talk to the same
effect, lies in confusing the beliefs of poets and the subject matter of
their verse with its position in the national consciousness. Oppenheim,
Sandburg and Lindsay are democrats, just as Whitman was a democrat, but
their poetry is no more a democratic phenomenon than his was, or than,
to go to music, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was. Many of the new poets,
in truth, are ardent enemies of democracy, for example, Pound. Only one
of them has ever actually sought to take his strophes to the vulgar.
That one is Lindsay—and there is not the slightest doubt that the yokels
welcomed him, not because they were interested in his poetry, but
because it struck them as an amazing, and perhaps even a fascinatingly
obscene thing, for a sane man to go about the country on any such
bizarre and undemocratic business.