"... But I would implore them to abstain from wearing their
knees out before the shrine of the ugly and grotesque when
there is all the beauty of the world for the choosing."--SIR
JOHNSTONE FORBES-ROBERTSON.
Away back in the dark ages, when the kindergarten was still an
experiment, a stern elderly person--doubtless a relic of the yet earlier
age in which children addressed their mother as "Honoured Madam," and
never sat down in their father's presence--a person of far-seeing but
ruthless mind, would every now and then arise to predict that Froebel
and his disciples, by making things too easy for the infant
intelligence, would produce a spineless generation, with the mentality
of rubber dolls. Changing the figure, with apparently an eye upon the
dentist, this pessimist would point out that a pap-fed race could have
occasion for, and therefore would develop, no teeth.
It is far from my purpose to venture, with presumptuous foot, into the
happy fields of pedagogy: it is only that certain straws, gyrating in
the intellectual zephyrs of the moment, have arrested an inquiring eye,
and awakened a mental question as to how far the disaffected prophet may
have been right. Is the multiplication-table set to music, and gayly
sung rather than acquired with labor and sorrow in the dark watches of
the study-hour after school, really responsible for a contemporary
mental condition which seems to demand that even the simplest short
story be expounded by the editor, in type which dwarfs the title, lest
the readers' brains grope vainly for its meaning? Have our early
fumblings with strips of many-colored paper rendered us incapable of
coping with even the most obvious canvas? Were those well-beloved blocks
and cubes the true instigators of Csaky, Brancusi, Delaunay, and the
rest--sculptors who last year set us gasping? Did "Birdie in the
treetop" blaze the trail for the divers exponents of "interpretative
dancing?" Most harrowing of all, have the "finger-plays" of babyhood,
designed for the gradual awakening of the child's consciousness to his
five senses and his little ego, led up to the reverberating chaos of
words which we are now called upon seriously to regard as poetry?
Let the responsibility rest where it may, we have been relentlessly
herded and driven far by those who in this day and generation assume to
mold our opinions for us. We have survived the onslaught of Cubism,
Futurism, St. Vitism and what not, in art: is there anything in stone or
bronze, or on canvas, that can now take us by surprise? We have outlived
the shock, and can even derive pleasure from the spectacle, of our
elders joyously cavorting between the tables when we ask them out to
dine; other times, other manners. We have learned to listen unabashed
and with the proper modicum of concern while Sweet-and-twenty, who has
been to the "movies" and knows whereof she speaks, discourses between
the soup and fish upon themes erstwhile supposed to be undiscussible,
unless by physicians and students of sociology. We can even look without
remonstrance upon our nearest and dearest attired only less frankly than
Josephine when she essayed to convince the world of the superiority of
her challenged charms to those of Madame Tallien. We have had hitherto
one refuge when all this grew too much for us: we could exclaim, if we
still had the hardihood to quote Tennyson, "I will bury myself in my
books"--of course omitting the remainder of the line, which is
"unsocial." Now this stronghold also has been battered down. If we seek
diversion in a story which is really a story, and not a tract--if we
venture still to take pleasure in those who until to-day have been
considered poets--we are upheld to the contumely of our fellows as
"primitive," "elementary," and our beliefs are made a by-word and a
hissing in the public prints. Ours not to reason why, ours not to make
reply: we are expected to go for artistic and literary pabulum where we
are sent--"forty feeding as one," like Wordsworth's cattle; and perhaps,
to borrow once more from the Light Brigade, ours but to do and die,
intellectually, may be the result.
Doubtless most of the "advanced investigators" (inspired circumlocution
of M. Andre Salmon) in both art and literature are sincere; yet it seems
an almost unavoidable conclusion that this epidemic which is upon us in
many forms, all disagreeable and unnecessary, like any other epidemic,
arises from a physiological condition akin to the tarantism which once
swept southern Europe, giving the tarantella its name, and not to be
cured even by the startling method of burying the victim up to the neck
in earth. The mythic spider having bitten him, whirl he must, until he
drop exhausted. Crueler than the earlier spider of whose bite noble Tom
Thumb died, the ferocious arachnid of our day, like the _Lycosa
tarantula_ of the Middle Ages, is ravaging at will, and sparing no age,
sex, or previous condition of activity. The "bite" may not prove fatal:
but while the madness lasts, clarity of vision, calm and coherent
utterance, are not to be expected. The dervish-like frenzy of literary
and artistic production will of course eventually wear itself out; but
until it does, those who by Heaven's mercy have been spared the
infection can only, with what patience the gods vouchsafe, stand out of
the way and look on, deafened by the insistent remedial strains.
Even as heat-waves above the summer fields and sands cause fixed objects
to shimmer and fluctuate before the eyes, sometimes creating actual
mirage, so the extraordinary brain-waves of our day seem to influence
human conduct and, necessarily, its reflex, achievement in art and
letters. It is not that both subject and handling are so often grotesque
or deplorable; it is not--though the spread of any epidemic is
regrettable--that more and more worthy craftsmen fall victims,
hypnotised by others' gyral eccentricities, and by what a recent
promulgator of the cult terms "the strident and colossal song." It is
that these, clamoring for their own prepossession, deny us ours!
"Dolly," besought the heroine of Miss Broughton's first novel, the novel
which created a school of fiction, and which her unsuspecting father
told her was unfit for her, a young woman, to read: "Dolly, am I so very
ugly? Look!" Her sister, thus adjured, surveyed the appealing face. "I
do not admire you," she returned, calmly. "But that is no reason why
some one should not!" Cannot the apostles of the tarantist persuasion,
in its varying manifestations, show us an equal liberality? They do not
admire what one of them has summed up as "the completely solved,
tabulated, indexed problems of the past:" but may not others who do be
permitted to enjoy them in peace, unobjurgated? Those who are labelled
"early-Victorian," "primitive," "elementary," are usually possessed of
the ornament, no less out of date, of a meek and quiet spirit; and, if
let alone, will continue on their unobtrusive way, neither assailing nor
disparaging schools whose inspirations do not attract them. Why may they
not be permitted to adhere to their ideals, unwhipt of neo-justice?--since
the untrammelled tarantist proclaims with no hesitating voice his right
to stand up, naked and unashamed, for his own!
There is one certain result of intellectual or any other sort of
bullying; present forcibly enough to any man that he is merely a worm,
and he is bound in the nature of things to "turn," with what vigor he
may--and as the late Sir William Gilbert well said, "Devil blame the
worms!" Tell a man often enough, and contemptuously enough, that he
doesn't know what he is talking about, and his most cherished beliefs
are only so much junk, and you inevitably goad him into nailing his
colors to the mast. The holy martyrs need not have died for their
convictions if they had not been badgered into, not merely holding, but
flaunting them! Again, to fall back upon my Gilbert, "versifier" and
master of "smart-aleckry" though it seems he was, as measured by a
recent standard--
"I hate to preach, I hate to prate,
I'm no fanatic croaker;"
and I am driven to couch my lance and gallop into the lists chiefly by a
modern form of challenge unrecognized of Chivalry: "My ladye is fairest
because yours is foul and void of grace!" Your lady is fairest?--no man
has a better right than you to think so, or to say so: but it is
unknightly to attempt bolstering up her claims by a personal attack upon
_my_ ladye, whose charms I justifiably hold to be supreme. The glaive
being down, there is nothing for it but the onset--and may the best man
win!
In less archaic phrase, no man who knows his Milton and his Wordsworth
can sit silent and be told that "when a perfect sonnet" (a _perfect_
sonnet, remember!) "is duly whittled out, it is usually found to be
worth about as much as a well-crocheted lambrequin"--whatever that may
be. No man who has delighted in his Praed, his Ingoldsby, his Locker,
Calverley, Lang, Austin Dobson, Owen Seaman and the rest, can see them
all swept into the scrap-heap as "worn out--an exhibition of adroitness
... for impressing a circus audience!" No man can hear with patience the
undoubted fact that the blank verse of Shakspeare and Milton was
"written quite without rhyme," adduced, with an air of giving light to
them that sit in darkness, by way of supporting a hurly-burly of words
which has been well compared to "pumpkins rolling over a barn-floor."
That blank verse does not rhyme is too "elementary" to need discussion:
and the Eocene minds which still read Shakspeare, Milton, and even
Tennyson, are thoroughly aware that the construction of blank verse is
governed by no less rigorous rules than the sonnet or the dainty old
French forms which Austin Dobson and our own Bunner made exquisite in
English. But the foe of rhyme is by no means limited to blank verse in
support of his thesis: experiments in unrhymed metre are by no means
new. Bulwer tamed the Latin verse-forms to eat out of his hand; Ossian
and his collateral descendant, "Fiona Macleod," made chamber music of
the wild harp of the Gael; Aldrich, in his youth, went far toward
establishing his fame with the _Ballad of Baby Bell_: Charles Henry
Lueders, untimely dead a generation ago, achieved a gem in his brief
dirge, _The Four Winds_. One may be a poet without ever having written a
line in metre. It is doubtful whether Mrs. Meynell's well-won
reputation--a reputation which brought her, in a "popular ballot" for
England's laureateship, nearly six thousand votes, and a place second
only to Rudyard Kipling--does not rest quite as much upon the poetic
beauty of her essays as upon her verse. "The mighty engine of English
prose" is always available for the writer with "a message;" Lincoln did
not elect to "sing" his Gettysburg address, which no recent bard whom it
has been my privilege to read has surpassed. If the bearer of the
"message" have not the sense of music which produces that perfection of
rhythm needing no grace of rhyme; if he object to rhyme "because,"
according to a recent candid outburst, "it is so confoundedly hard to
find!" the lyre and even the oaten pipe are not for him. Nothing is
easier to compass, in either prose or metre, than the cryptic, the
portentous; the bellow of the trombone, the thud of the big drum, will
always cause some one to listen, at least long enough to find out what
is causing the disturbance. But neither Vorticist, Polyrhythmicist, nor
any other specialist in Parnassian wares, need flatter himself that
lines of assorted lengths, huddled like jack-straws, make poetry. If any
message be there, it is obscured and marred by its uncouth disguise; if
there be no message, the "work" has even less excuse for being. I am far
from denying the right of every one to express himself in whatever way
he think fit: it is wholly his own affair, and it may be, like
Benedick's hypothetical lady's hair, "of what color it please God." But
if it be neither verse nor honest prose--if it be cacophony for mere
cacophony's sake--he who takes in vain for it the name of poetry, does
it little service.
One of the strange symptoms of the modern tarantism is this unrelenting
hostility to beauty: in fashion not less than in art it is the ugly and
the queer, in fiction and verse the pathological, the unpleasant, that
seem to be assiduously striven for. The arts are sisters, children of
one father; their aims are closely allied, and if one step down from her
high estate, the others are likely soon to show the unfortunate
influence of her example. Bad taste in sculpture affects us more
disagreeably than bad taste in painting, because sculpture stands forth
with us, in our own atmosphere, while the picture confines within its
frame an atmosphere of its own; bad taste in dancing is worse in the
drawing room than on the stage, being by so much nearer; and bad taste
in literary expression is more distressing than any, because, after all,
it is only music which has so intimate an appeal as the written word.
Only music and the written word become a part of us, dwelling with us
unsought, singing to us unurged, lingering with us in the silent hours
when our mental sentinels or taskmasters are off guard, and if a
graceless pretender, professing to be what he is not, intrude upon the
starry company of the heaven-born, shall not the intrusion be resented?
What is poetry? There are many definitions with which few of us can
quarrel; but one of the most direct, and at the same time most
comprehensive, is that poetry is the expression, in terms of beauty, of
what humanity feels--that beauty of thought, beauty of feeling, beauty
of form, which implies truth, sympathy, clarity of vision, imagination,
and the unerring sense of fitness which is good taste. And if this
God-given beauty, twin-sister to music, be not inextricably woven, like
a three-fold thread of gold, through and through the very fabric of the
soul, it is never to be acquired--no mastery of prosody, of rules, of
libraries full of the "best examples," will avail. It is distinct from
inspiration, which may be a single bolt from the blue: it is rather an
attribute, to venture upon the methods of Sir Boyle Roche, of the voice
of that inmost higher self which the late F. W. H. Myers called "the
subliminal mind" and which Maeterlinck has termed "our unknown guest."
Let the man whose literary endeavor, well-intended though it be, is
without this essence, call himself what he please: he is not, nor can he
ever be, a poet.
Meanwhile, those who remain unbitten of the dread _Lycosa_ may find
peace in M. Andre Salmon's dictum that "critics encourage the most
absurd, for the most absurd is necessary to art"--which may be stretched
to include the art of letters--and anything that is really necessary
may, by right effort, be endured. It is sufficiently clear that not on
this side of the bridge of Al Sirat shall we and the Neo-Parnassians
agree: but we can at least avoid each other like gentlemen.