Artists to-day are better losers than were the "foot-in-the-grave
young men." Among them one now finds less and less childish petulance,
outspoken jealousy of others' success, and apology for their own
failure. Some of this has been shamed out of them by discovering that
the good sportsman never apologizes or explains away his defeat. And
they are importing these manly tactics into the game of art. It has
not taken them long to see how ridiculous an athlete makes himself who
hides behind the excuse of sickness or lack of training. They are
impressed by the way in which the non-apologetic spirit is invading
the less athletic games, even down to such a sedentary affair as
chess. This remarkable rule, for example, was proposed in the recent
chess match between Lasker and Capablanca:
Illness shall not interfere with the playing of any game, on
the ground that it is the business of the players so to
train themselves that their bodies shall be in perfect
condition; and it is their duty, which by this rule is
enforced, to study their health and live accordingly.
The fourth factor of sportsmanship is the grace of a good winner. It
would seem as though the artist were learning not only to keep from
gloating over his vanquished rival, but also to be generous and
minimize his own victory. In Gilbert's day the failure did all the
apologizing. To-day less apologizing is done by the failure and more
by the success. The master in art is learning modesty, and from whom
but the master in sport? There are in the arts to-day fewer
megalomaniacs and persons afflicted with delusions of grandeur than
there were among the "_Je-ne-sais-quoi_ young men." Sport has made
them more normal spiritually, while making them more normal
physically. It has kept them younger. Old age has been attacked and
driven back all along the line. One reason why we no longer have so
many grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead
we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir
Mitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary
fossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of
progress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion,"
writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, by caring for the physical basis, keep
themselves young, why, the world will go far to catching up with
itself and becoming contemporaneous."
Gameness is the final factor of good sportsmanship. In the matter of
gameness, I grant that sport has little to teach the successful
artist. For it takes courage, dogged persistence, resiliency--in
short, the never-say-die spirit to succeed in any of the arts. It
takes the Browning spirit of those who
"fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake."
It takes the typical Anglo-Saxon gameness of Johnny Armstrong of the
old ballad:
"Said John, 'Fight on, my merry men all.
I am a little hurt, but I am not slain;
I will lay me down for to bleed a while,
And then I'll rise and fight with you again.'"
Yes, but what of the weaker brothers and sisters in art who have not
yet succeeded--perhaps for want of these very qualities? I believe
that a newly developed spirit of sportsmanship, acting upon a newly
developed body, will presently bring to many a disheartened struggler
just that increment of resilient gameness which will mean success
instead of failure.
Thus, while our artists show a tendency to hark back to the Greek
physical ideal, they are not harking backward but forward when they
yield to the mental and spiritual influences of sportsmanship. For
this spirit was unknown to the ancient world. Until yesterday art and
sportsmanship never met. But now that they are mating I am confident
that there will come of this union sons and daughters who shall
joyfully obey the summons that is still ringing down to us over the
heads of the anæmic contemporaries of the exuberant old sportsman,
Walt Whitman:
"Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than
before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me."
VII
PRINTED JOY
_The old joy which makes us more debtors to poetry than
anything else in life._
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
America is trying to emerge from the awkward age. Its body is
full-grown. Its spirit is still crude with a juvenile crudity. What
does this spirit need? Next to contact with true religion, it most
needs contact with true poetry. It needs to absorb the grace, the
wisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, and thrill in rhyme with
poetry's profound, spiritual insights.
The promising thing is that America is beginning to do exactly this
to-day. The entire history of our enjoyment of poetry might be summed
up in that curious symbol which appears over the letter _n_ in the
word "cañon." A rise, a fall, a rise. Here is the whole story of the
American poetry-lover. His enthusiasm first reached a high point
about the middle of the nineteenth century. A generation later it fell
into a swift decline. But three or four years ago it began to revive
so rapidly that a poetry-lover's renaissance is now a reality. This
renaissance has not yet been explained, although the majority of
readers and writers feel able to tell why poetry declined. Let us
glance at a few of the more popular explanations.
Many say that poetry declined in America because we turned ourselves
into a nation of entirely prosaic materialists. But if this is true,
how do they explain our present national solicitude for song-birds and
waterfalls, for groves of ancient trees, national parks, and
city-planning? How do they explain the fact that our annual
expenditure on the art of music is six times that of Germany, the
Fatherland of Tone? And how do they account for the flourishing
condition of some of our other arts? If we are hopelessly
materialistic, why should American painters and sculptors have such a
high world-standing? And why should their strongest, most original,
most significant work be precisely in the sphere of poetic, suggestive
landscape, and ideal sculpture? The answer is self-evident. It is no
utterly prosaic age, and people that founded our superb orchestras,
that produced and supported Winslow Homer, Tryon, and Woodbury,
French, Barnard, and Saint Gaudens. A more poetic hand than Wall
Street's built St. Thomas's and the cathedral, terminals and towers of
New York, Trinity Church in Boston, the Minnesota State Capitol, Bar
Harbor's Building of Arts, West Point, and Princeton University. It is
plain that our poetic decline was not wholly due to materialism.
Other philosophers are sure that whatever was the matter with poetry
was the fault of the poets themselves. Popular interest slackened,
they say, because the art first degenerated. Now an obvious answer to
this is that no matter how dead the living poets of any age become,
men may always turn, if they will, to those dead poets of old who live
forever on their shelves. But let us grant for the sake of argument
that any decline of contemporary poets is bound to effect
poetry-lovers in some mysteriously disastrous way. And let us recall
the situation back there in the seventies when the ebb of poetic
appreciation first set in. At that time Whittier, Holmes, Emerson, and
Whitman had only just topped the crest of the hill of accomplishment,
and the last-named was as yet no more generally known than was the
rare genius of the young Lanier. Longfellow, who remains even to-day
the most popular of our poets, was still in full swing. Lowell was in
his prime. Thus it appears that public appreciation, and not creative
power, was the first to trip and topple down the slopes of the
Parnassian hill. Not until then did the poet come "tumbling after."
Moreover, in the light of modern æsthetic psychology, this seems the
more natural order of events. It takes two to make a work of art: one
to produce, one to appreciate. The creative appreciator is a
correlative of all artistic expression. It is almost impossible for
the artist to accomplish anything amid the destructive atmosphere
exhaled by the ignorant, the stupid, the indifferent, the callous, or
the actively hostile. It follows that the demand for poetry is created
no more by the supply than the supply is created by the demand. Thus
the general indifference to this one department of American art was
_not_ primarily caused by the degenerating supply.
The decline and fall of our poetic empire have yet other Gibbons who
say that our civilization suddenly changed from the country to the
urban type, and that our love of poetry began to disappear
simultaneously with the general exodus from the countryside and the
mushroom growth of the large cities. So far I agree; but not with
their reason. For they say that poetry declined because cities are
such dreadfully unpoetic things; because they have become synonymous
only with riveting-machines and the kind of building that the Germans
call the "heaven-scratcher," with elevated railways, "sand hogs,"
whirring factories, and alleys reeking with the so-called "dregs" of
Europe. They claim that the new and hopelessly vulgar creed of the
modern city is epitomized by such things as a certain signboard in New
York, which offers a typically neo-urban solution of the old problem,
"What is art?"
---------------
| PARAGON PANTS |
| ARE ART |
---------------
the board declares. And this, they say, is about as poetic as a large
city ever becomes.
Now let us glance for a moment at the poems in prose and verse of Mr.
James Oppenheim, a young man for whom a metropolis is almost
completely epitomized by the riveting-machine, the sweat-shop, and
the slum. There we discover that this poet's vision has pierced
straight through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty
shimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, heroic forms of the
builders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly
hurling red-hot rivets through space, are so many young gods at play
with elemental forces. The sweat-shop is transmuted into as grim and
glorious a battlefield as any Tours or Gettysburg of them all. And the
dingy, battered old "L" train, as it clatters through the East Side
early on "morose, gray Monday morning," becomes a divine chariot
"winging through Deeps of the Lord with its eighty Earth-anchored
Souls."
Oh, yes; there is "God's plenty" of poetry in these sights and sounds,
if only one looks deep enough to discover the beauty of homeliness.
But there is even more of beauty and poetic inspiration to be drawn
from the city by him who, instead of thus straitly confining his gaze
to any one aspect of urban life, is able to see it steadily and see it
whole, with its subtle _nuances_ and its over-powering dramatic
contrasts--as a twentieth-century Walt Whitman, for example, might see
it if he had a dash of Tennyson's technical equipment, of Arnold's
sculpturesque polish and restraint, of Lanier's instinct for sensuous
beauty. What "songs greater than before known" might such a poet not
sing as he wandered close to precious records of the Anglo-Saxon
culture of the race amid the stately colonial peace and simplicity of
St. Mark's church-yard, with the vividly colored life of all
southeastern Europe surging about that slender iron fence--children of
the blood of Chopin and Tschaikowsky; of Gutenberg, Kossuth, and
Napoleon; of Isaiah and Plato, Leonardo and Dante--with the wild
strains of the gypsy orchestra floating across Second Avenue, and to
the southward a glimpse aloft in a rarer, purer air of builders
clambering on the cupola of a neighboring Giotto's tower built of
steel? Who dares say that the city is unpoetic? _It is one of the most
poetic places on earth._
These, then, are the chief explanations which have been offered us
to-day of the historic decline of the American poetry-lover. We weigh
them, and find them wanting. Why? Because they have sought, like
radiographers, far beneath the surface; whereas the real trouble has
been only skin deep. I shall try to show the nature of this trouble;
and how, by beginning to cure it, we have already brought on a poetic
renaissance.
Most of us who care for poetry frequently have one experience in
common. During our summer vacations in the country we suddenly
re-discover the well-thumbed "Golden Treasury" of Palgrave, and the
"Oxford Book of Verse" which have been so unaccountably neglected
during the city winter. We wander farther into the poetic fields and
revel in Keats and Shakespeare. We may even attempt once more to get
beyond the first book of the "Faërie Queene," or fumble again at the
combination lock which seems to guard the meaning of the second part
of "Faust." And we find these occupations so invigorating and joyful
that we model and cast an iron resolution to the effect that this
winter, whatever betide, we will read a little poetry every day, or
every week, as the case may be. On that we plunge back into the
beautiful, poetic, inspiring city, and adhere to our poetry-reading
program--for exactly a fortnight. Then, unaccountably, our resolve
begins to slacken. We cannot seem to settle our minds to ordered
rhythms "where more is meant than meets the ear." Our resolve
collapses. Once again Palgrave is covered with dust. But vacation time
returns. After a few days in green pastures and beside still waters
the soul suddenly turns like a homing-pigeon to poetry. And the old,
perplexing cycle begins anew.
A popular magazine once sent a certain young writer and ardent
amateur of poetry on a long journey through the Middle West. He took
but one book in his bag. It was by Whitman (the poet of cities, mark).
And he determined to read it every evening in his bedroom after the
toils of the day. The first part of the trip ran in the country.
"Afoot and light-hearted" he took to the open road every morning, and
reveled every evening in such things as "Manahatta," "The Song of
Joys," and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Then he carried his poet of
cities to a city. But the two would have nothing to do with one
another. And to the traveler's perplexity, a place no larger than
Columbus, Ohio, put a violent end to poetry on that trip.
In our day most poetry-lovers have had such experiences. These have
been hard to explain, however, only because their cause has been
probed for too profoundly. _The chief cause of the decline of poetry
was not spiritual but physical._ Cities are not unpoetic in spirit. It
is only in the physical sense that Emerson's warning is true: "If
thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York ... thou shalt find no
radiance of meaning in the lonely wastes of the pine woods." The
trouble was this: that the modern type of city, when it started into
being, back in the seventies, began to take from men, and to use up,
that margin of nervous energy, that exuberant overplus of vitality of
which so much has already been said in this book, and which is always
needed for the true appreciation of poetry. Grant Allen has shown that
man, when he is conscious of a superfluity of sheer physical strength,
gives himself to play; and in like manner, when he is conscious of a
superfluity of receptive power, _which has a physical basis_, he gives
himself to art.
Now, though all of the arts demand of their appreciators this overplus
of nervous energy (and Heaven knows perfectly well how inadequate a
supply is offered up to music and the arts of design!), yet the
appreciation of poetry above that of the sister arts demands this
bloom on the cheek of existence. For poetry, with quite as much of
emotional demand as the others, combines a considerably greater and
more persistent intellectual demand, involving an unusual amount of
physical wear and tear. Hence, in an era of overstrain, poetry is the
first of the arts to suffer.
Most lovers of poetry must realize, when they come to consider it,
that their pleasure in verse rises and falls, like the column of
mercury in a barometer, with the varying levels of their physical
overplus. Physical overplus, however, is the thing which life in a
modern city is best calculated to keep down.
Surely it was no mere coincidence that, back there in the seventies,
just at the edge of the poetic decline, city life began to grow so
immoderately in volume and to be "speeded up" and "noised up" so
abruptly that it took our bodies by surprise. This process has kept on
so furiously that the bodies of most of us have never been able to
catch up. No large number have yet succeeded in readjusting
themselves completely to the new pace of the city. And this continues
to exact from most of us more nervous energy than any life may, which
would keep us at our best. Hence, until we have succeeded either in
accomplishing the readjustment, or in spending more time in the
country, the appreciation of poetry has continued to suffer.
Even in the country, it is, of course, perfectly true that life spins
faster now than it used to--what with telephones and inter-urban
trolleys, the motor, and the R.F.D. But this rural progress has
arrived with no such stunning abruptness as to outdistance our powers
of readjustment. When we go from city to country we recede to a rate
of living with which our nervous systems can comfortably fall in, and
still control for the use of the mind and spirit a margin of that
delicious vital bloom which resembles the ring of the overtones in
some beautiful voice.
But how is it practicable to keep this margin in the city, when the
roar of noisy traffic over noisy pavements, the shrieks of newsboy and
peddler, the all-pervading chronic excitement, the universal
obligation to "step lively," even at a funeral, are every instant
laying waste our conscious or unconscious powers? How are we to give
the life of the spirit its due of poetry when our precious margin is
forever leaking away through lowered vitality and even sickness due to
lack of sleep, unhygienic surroundings, constant interruption (or the
expectation thereof), and the impossibility of relaxation owing to the
never-ending excitement and interest and sexual stimulus of the great
human pageant--its beauty and suggestiveness?
Apart from the general destruction of the margin of energy, one
special thing that the new form of city life does to injure poetry is
to keep uppermost in men's consciousness a feverish sense of the
importance of the present moment. We might call this sense the
journalistic spirit of the city. How many typical metropolitans one
knows who are forever in a small flutter of excitement over whatever
is just happening, like a cub reporter on the way to his first fire,
or a neuræsthete--if one may coin a word--who perceives a spider on
her collarette. This habit of mind soon grows stereotyped, and is, of
course, immensely stimulated by the multitudinous editions of our
innumerable newspapers. The city gets one to living so intensely in
the present minute, and often in the very most sensational second of
that minute, that one grows impatient of the "olds," and comes to
regard a constantly renewed and increased dose of "news" as the only
present help in a chronic time of trouble. This is a kind of mental
drug-habit. And its origin is physical. It is a morbid condition
induced by the over-paced life of cities.
Long before the rise of the modern city--indeed, more than a century
ago--Goethe, who was considerably more than a century ahead of his
age, wrote to Schiller from Frankfort of the journalistic spirit of
cities and its relation to poetry:
It seems to me very remarkable how things stand with the
people of a large city. They live in a constant delirium of
getting and consuming, and the thing we call atmosphere can
neither be brought to their attention nor communicated to
them. All recreations, even the theater, must be mere
distractions; and the great weakness of the reading public
for newspapers and romances comes just from the fact that
the former always, and the latter generally, brings
distraction into the distraction. Indeed, I believe that I
have noticed a sort of dislike of poetic productions--or at
least in so far as they _are_ poetic--which seems to me to
follow quite naturally from these very causes. Poetry
requires, yes, it absolutely commands, concentration. It
isolates man against his own will. It forces itself upon him
again and again; and is as uncomfortable a possession as a
too constant mistress.
If this reporter's attitude of mind was so rampant in cultivated urban
Germany a century ago as to induce "a sort of dislike of poetic
productions," what sort of dislike of them must it not be inducing
to-day? For the appreciation of poetry cannot live under the same
roof with the journalistic spirit. The art needs long, quiet vistas
backward and forward, such as are to be had daily on one of those
"lone heaths" where Hazlitt used to love to stalk ideas, but such as
are not to be met with in Times Square or the Subway.
The joyful side of the situation is that this need is being met. A few
years ago the city dwellers of America began to return to nature. The
movement spread until every one who could afford it, habitually fled
from the city for as long a summer outing as possible. More and more
people learned the delightful sport of turning an abandoned farm into
a year-round country estate. The man who was tied to a city office
formed the commuting habit, thus keeping his wife and children
permanently away from the wear and tear of town. The suburban area was
immensely increased by the rapid spread of motoring.
Thus, it was recently made possible for hundreds of thousands of
Americans to live, at least a considerable part of the year, where
they could hoard up an overplus of vitality. The result was that these
well-vitalized persons, whenever they returned to the city, were
better able to stand--and adjust themselves to--the severe urban pace,
than were the fagged city people. It was largely by the impact of this
new vitality that the city was roused to the importance of physical
efficiency, so that it went in for parks, gymnasia, baths, health and
welfare campaigns, athletic fields, playgrounds, Boy Scouts, Campfire
Girls, and the like.
There are signs everywhere that we Americans have, by wise living,
begun to win back the exuberance which we lost at the rise of the
modern city. One of the surest indications of this is the fact that
the nation has suddenly begun to read poetry again, very much as the
exhausted poetry-lover instinctively turns again to his Palgrave
during the third week of vacation. In returning to neglected nature we
are returning to the most neglected of the arts. The renaissance of
poetry is here. And men like Masefield, Noyes, and Tagore begin to
vie in popularity with the moderately popular novelists. Moreover this
is only the beginning. Aviation has come and is reminding us of the
ancient prophecy of H. G. Wells that the suburbs of a city like New
York will now soon extend from Washington to Albany. Urban centers are
being diffused fast; but social-mindedness is being diffused faster.
Men are wishing more and more to share with each brother man the
brimming cup of life. Aircraft and true democracy are on the way to
bear all to the land of perpetual exuberance. And on their wings the
poet will again mount to that height of authority and esteem from
which, in the healthful, athletic days of old, Homer and Sophocles
dominated the minds and spirits of their fellow-men. That is to
say--he will mount if we let him. In the following chapter I shall
endeavor to show why the American poet has as yet scarcely begun to
share in the poetry-renaissance.
VIII
THE JOYFUL HEART FOR POETS
_Nothing probably is more dangerous for the human race than
science without poetry, civilization without culture._
HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN.
_A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is
a joke._
MAX EASTMAN.
In the last two chapters we have seen the contemporary master of
various arts, and the reader of poetry, engaged in cultivating the
joyful heart. But there is one artist who has not yet been permitted
to join in this agreeable pastime. He is the American poet. And as his
inclusion would be an even more joyful thing for his land than for
himself, this book may not ignore him.