Part 20
The humanist is aware that poetry, like mythology, possesses no power of conferring immediate revelation of truth; he knows that its scenes and personages, its thoughts and passions, from the earthiest to the most ethereal, belong to the world of unsubstantiality, of illusion--of dreams, if you will. He will go further: this element of illusion, this impassable gulf between reality and our comprehension or representation of reality, is not confined to poetry and mythology; it is part of all our conscious life; it baffles us even in our attempt to comprehend that nearest thing of all--ourself. “... beneath the surface of all we see and feel, beneath the very act of seeing and feeling, lies the unredeemed chaos of desires and impressions, unlimited, unmeaning, unfathomable, incalculable, formless, dark. Life is but appearance, and this personality we call by our name is but illusion within illusion.”[58] But working within the illusion is also a power to control and order these impulses, to check them or to bring them into a harmonious co-operation, yielding a serenity and a sense of stability which, of all human experiences, seems freest of illusion. It was the characteristic error of much nineteenth-century poetry (of Browning’s in England, of Whitman’s in America) to limit personality to the mere welter of desires and feelings, to find there its central “urge” (the favourite word of romantic criticism), and to erect upon such foundations a philosophy of the “ideal.” But the hollowness of _this_ illusion (the philosophy which found an immediacy of truth in natural instincts, impulses, and feelings) has to-day become all too apparent; and when its former adherents ask where then certainty can be found, they are bidden to direct their gaze to the abstract world of the physicist and the mathematician. Here, in the words of Mr. I. A. Richards, “intellectual certainty is, almost for the first time, available, and on an unlimited scale.”[59] But even if this were so,--and one hears of developments in these fields that appear to make the certainty considerably less than absolute,--it would still be a certainty about matters that have no particular relation to the behaviour and feelings of human beings, and that give no support for poetry. The beguiling mirage of an Absolute fostered by romantic poetry has disappeared, only to be replaced by the mirage of another Absolute, terrifying though incomprehensible. And so we have come to the _impasse_ already described.
From the point of view of the humanist, what has so suddenly collapsed is the towering structure of nineteenth-century romanticism, not any dwelling necessary to the continued life of poetry. For he has long recognised those metaphysical limitations with which contemporary physics is so deeply entangled; and he has been unwilling to trust metaphysics, any more completely than natural science, with the whole determination of a philosophy of life. Instead of asserting that intellectual certainty in the field of science is available now almost for the first time on an unlimited scale, he would postulate a large degree of what amounts to _practical_ certainty, in all that concerns us most nearly as ethical beings, available now, as it has been for centuries. This assurance is embodied, for him, in the dualism of the great historic religions, in the teachings of Socrates and of Jesus, and in the most persistent traditions of European literature. But its final sanctions are not found in any “great tradition,” however imposing; they are arrived at empirically and experimentally by any one who, divesting his mind of shibboleths and catch-words, will honestly examine his own impulses and springs of action. In his own soul he will find the cleavage, the dualism, which runs through human nature. This opposition of forces, by whatever names he calls them, by whatever symbols he represents them, may never be resolved; but in his mysterious power of intervention in their unending conflict lies, for him, the ultimate reality within the illusion. To the reading of poetry, then, he will bring the same habit of discrimination that serves him in the conduct of life, mindful that it is still a world communicating with ours by the gate of horn and the gate of ivory, and that the phantasms which issue therefrom may light our way a few steps nearer truth, or may deepen for us the shadows of the dark, chaotic flux.
To the consciousness of intellectual defeat and spiritual dismay, evidenced so widely in contemporary literature, it is not to be expected that poetry will for the present make any very direct or explicit answer. For we do not look to poetry for polemics, for the formulation of ethical or metaphysical ideas; and when poetry tries to assume a burden that belongs rather to criticism and philosophy, the result may have literary interest and excellence, as does Pope’s _Essay on Man_, but is more likely to be merely dull and forced, like the later work of Wordsworth or Browning. In either case some fulness of life belonging to poetry when confident in its own right is missing. No, what we look for in the poet is some more pervasive or implicit evidence of his scale of values, some intuitive, and for that reason more certain, indication of the quality of his response to life, felt as unmistakably in his imagery, his diction, and his rhythms as in those more ponderable elements of style which the eighteenth century called “fable” and “sentiments.” Thus, in two stanzas[60] of A. E. Housman--
The year might age, and cloudy The lessening day might close, But air of other summers Breathed from beyond the snows, And I had hope of those.
They came and were and are not And come no more anew; And all the years and seasons That ever can ensue Must now be worse and few.
--something that belongs to his deepest intuition (his acceptance, without evasion and without reconciliation, of life’s transitoriness) is caught in the very movement of the lines and the simplicity of the words:
They came and were and are not.
This pervasive sense of things chiefly valued and most deeply felt, which every great poet’s work gives us, is surely not determined altogether by forces external to him. The poet is something more than a highly sensitised receiving-set for remote, scattered goings-on in the world at large. What we prize in every poet we come to know intimately is some irreducible, _given_ quality of the personality. We shall not easily accept, therefore, the current argument that, in an age like ours of dissolving faiths, the only genuine kind of poetry must be one which has cut itself off from belief of any kind.[61] The history of English literature is not lacking in instances of poets who have withstood the pressure of their age: to recall only the greatest, the poems of Milton, from _Lycidas_ to _Samson Agonistes_, are triumphant testimonies against the idea that poetry need be so utterly subject to contemporaneous disintegrating influences. But if we claim for poetry a certain power of immunity from such forces, neither, by the same course of reasoning, should we expect too much from the _direct_ effect upon it of those forces which we think salutary, such as humanism.
I do not mean to suggest here the notion of poetry’s having a life of its own in any transcendental sense, or to imply that poets possess mysterious astral powers. My thought is simply that the new humanism, before it is given any large imaginative expression in American poetry, must expect to prove its worth by responding to broadly human, and not alone specifically poetic needs. It will do this by its power of bringing harmony into lives which are ordered in accordance with its insight, of establishing in society “a current of fresh and true ideas,” and of creating thus “a quickening and sustaining atmosphere” which poetry can breathe. I feel no need of apologising for my use of these well-worn phrases of Matthew Arnold; not only was he the best representative of the spirit of humanism in nineteenth-century England or America, but also, in his realisation of the hopeless disparity between natural processes and human aims, he anticipated the very pattern of our own dilemma. The paralysis which came over Arnold’s poetic powers in later life is sometimes attributed to the steady growth of his humanistic interests, requiring the ampler medium of prose. However that may be, I believe it certain that his humanism--his sense, that is, of the worth and fruitfulness of human powers when wisely exercised and his acceptance of the limitations which such a view imposes--gave to his poetry nearly all that power of invigoration and refreshment for which we chiefly value it. A contemporary critic, R. H. Hutton, observed how frequently Arnold closes a poem on the burdensomeness of existence by some seemingly unconnected figure or story, such as the simile of the Tyrian trader in “The Scholar Gipsy,” instinct with the pride and buoyancy of old world enterprise. “‘The problem is insoluble,’ he seems to say, ‘but insoluble or not, let us recall the pristine strength of the human spirit, and not forget that we have access to great resources still.’”[62] In such ways to-day, indirectly and obliquely, humanism may make itself felt as one influence among many upon contemporary poetry: by rendering accessible and operative, for the poets as for the rest of us, some of these moral energies from times of more robust faith and higher intellectual vitality than our own.
FOOTNOTES
[45] Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers.
[46] “If you disregard critical trivialities and didactic accessories, the entire æsthetic system of Croce amounts to a hunt for pseudonyms of the word ‘art,’ and may indeed be stated briefly and accurately in this formula: art = intuition = expression = feeling = imagination = fancy = lyricism = beauty. And you must be careful not to take these words with the shadings and distinctions which they have in ordinary or scientific language. Not a bit of it. Every word is merely a different series of syllables signifying absolutely and completely the same thing.”--G. Papini, _Four and Twenty Minds_, quoted by I. A. Richards, _The Principles of Literary Criticism_ (1924), p. 255, note 4.
Mr. Richards adds: “It is interesting to notice that Croce’s appeal has been exclusively to those unfamiliar with the subject, to the man of letters and the dilettante. He has been ignored by serious students of the mind.... [Papini] has here rendered a notable service to those who have been depressed by the vogue of ‘Expressionism.’”
_Cf._ also the following from Gilbert Murray’s _The Classical Tradition in Poetry_ (1927), p. 243: “Everything that a man does is self-expression. The way a man laces his boots, the way he writes, the way he says, ‘Good-morning,’ is probably different from the way followed by any other man, and is thus expressive of his personality. But it need not be good art for that reason. Imagine a pompous and egotistic man in a state of personal irritation, having to make an after-dinner speech. It would probably express him only too well, but it might not be a good speech.”
[47] _A Survey of Modernist Poetry_, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, 1927, p. 125.
[48] From _Harmonium_, by Wallace Stevens, 1923. Reprinted by and with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised publishers.
[49] For the sake of “communicative efficacy,” as the editors remind me, I should explain that _transition_ is “an international quarterly for creative experiment,” edited in Paris by a group of young Americans and others.
[50] From _Trivial Breath_, by Elinor Wylie, 1928. Reprinted by and with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised publishers.
[51] From _Streets in the Moon_, by Archibald MacLeish, 1926. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers.
[52] From _Tulips and Chimneys_. Reprinted by permission of Alfred & Charles Boni, Inc., Publishers.
[53] For a more elaborate analysis of such effects in Mr. Cummings’s poetry, see Laura Riding and Robert Graves, _A Survey of Modernist Poetry_, Chapter I.
[54] E. E. Cummings’s poem, previously referred to, is printed by him as follows (_Tulips and Chimneys_, New York, 1924, p. 78):
i was considering how within night’s loose sack a star’s nibbling in- fin -i- tes- i -mal- ly devours
darkness the hungry star which will e -ven tu- al -ly jiggle the bait of dawn and be jerked
into eternity. when over my head a shooting star Bur s (t into a stale shriek like an alarm-clock)
[55] Such, for instance, as the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson in the South, and of Wilbert Snow and Robert P. Tristram Coffin in New England.
[56] From the poem “Earth,” in _Dust and Light_, 1919, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[57] Mr. Robinson, of course, had been publishing poetry for nearly twenty years before the new movement got under way, but his work was regarded as belonging to it in temper and outlook.
[58] Paul Elmer More, “Definitions of Dualism,” Section LXXIII, in _The Drift of Romanticism_ (1913), p. 291. The next section is almost prophetic of what has happened in American poetry of the last few years:
“In some men, especially in an age of spiritual apathy, the sense of disillusion may spring up without the corresponding assurance of faith. To such men nothing is real; they walk in a place of shadows, and feel that life is continually slipping away from them into a bottomless abyss. All their labour is to re-create for themselves the illusion which has been shattered, or, by ceaseless occupation, to escape the dull horror of the void.”
[59] I. A. Richards, _Science and Poetry_, 1926, p. 60.
[60] From _Last Poems_, by A. E. Housman, 1922, published by Henry Holt and Company.
[61] I. A. Richards, _Science and Poetry_, Chapter VII.
[62] Richard Holt Hutton, _Essays on Some of the Modern Guides to English Thought in Matters of Faith_, 1891 (Second Ed., revised), p. 146.
_Our Critical Spokesmen_
GORHAM B. MUNSON
“Art,” I thought I heard a voice say as I sat down to my table, “aims to _be_ something; while criticism aims first to clarify and then to _value_ something. Criticism is talk _about_ something with a view to passing judgment upon it. It is an aspect of man the valuer, weighing the actions, impulses, passions, thoughts, and imaginings of his fellow-men. Study the criticism of a period and it will show you the state of the general intelligence and the kind of values professed and in vogue, and above all it will enable you to divine the amount of consciousness of life’s processes and meanings which is current in this period.”
“So,” I remarked to the air, “the subject I have been thinking about has some importance? It has to do with man in his most human rôle, that of valuing, and it assists in indicating the range and depth and intensity of his awareness of life.”
But there was no reply to this, and perceiving that I must dig with my own mind, I scratched down what I had previously decided should be my opening sentence. I had been dwelling on the subject of American literary criticism from 1915 to the present. About 1915 a new phase in our national letters began to be manifest. Europe was well drenched in blood and the _Lusitania_ was torpedoed in 1915--events that were vitally to affect us. Mr. Dreiser’s _The “Genius”_ came out, and the next year, 1916, it was suppressed by its publishers out of deference to the power of a narrow censoring body soon to be effectively challenged. American liberals in the wake of Bull Moose Progressivism had hopefully established the _New Republic_. Mr. P. E. More in the year previous to 1915 had resigned from the editorship of the _Nation_.
Afterwards there came our participation in the war: the crushing of liberalism: post-war disillusion. There came a ferment of new magazines and new publishers, captivating the sons and leaving the fathers cold. There came a tide of naturalistic novels, a foam of _vers libre_, a roar of essays attacking the genteel tradition. Since 1915 the reputations have been made of Messrs. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Waldo Frank, H. L. Mencken, and Eugene O’Neill--to name only enough to establish a contrast with the writers of the preceding period. Inevitably it happened that some excitable journalists in the midst of the uprising promptly called this decade and a half an American literary renaissance.
To me, on reviewing these years, they seem more like a tragi-comedy, almost a tragi-farce. So when I penned my premeditated first sentence I spoke of the tragi-comedy of American criticism. But even if our recent criticism has been very often foolish, we are to take it seriously for reasons outside itself,--if my voice out of the air is to be believed. I must now try to develop the line of thought that moves out from the opening sentence I wrote down when my aerial counsellor deserted me.
I
There have been no villains in the recent tragi-comedy of American literary criticism.
The leading critics of our nation have not been villains--that is, amazing men of initiative, strength, and will bent on destruction--but rather they make us think of well-intentioned bookish gentlemen gyrating in the fields of certain hidden sociological magnets and vociferating their reflexes to the magnetic attractions. On behalf of a potential human greatness, there are perhaps great errors in the present world of literary criticism to be opposed, but there are with us no great men, no geniuses, to be overthrown. In other words, our critics are not germinative but derivative.
I mean, of course, our professional critics. It is plain that I am not setting out to praise them--not even by calling them villains, for villains must, to satisfy my conception of the scale on which the intellectual drama of the race has been played, possess a certain epical character. There is another world of criticism, the academic world, whose faults have often been exposed scornfully and truthfully. Lying out of the eye of the reading public, it never bears any relation, according to the professional critics, with what is being currently written. Yet it has its virtues of course: there is a laudatory paper for some one to write on recent advances in American literary scholarship: within academic circles there has grown up the only critical movement in our land now worthy of international interest, and the leaders of this movement, Professors Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, are--I have several times committed myself to the assertion--the best living critics America can show. It is not with the academic world nor with humanism, however, that I am here dealing, but with the critics of the past fifteen years who have enjoyed something like popularity. First, let us follow the figure of the late Stuart P. Sherman, once a successful university professor, as he flies away from the campus into the full light of public attention beating upon the world of professional criticism.
Stuart P. Sherman is of exceptional interest to us. He admired Matthew Arnold: he wrote a popular exposition of Arnold, and a course of his entirely devoted to Arnold is said to have been popular with the students at the University of Illinois. Let us then, noting this affinity, measure Sherman by Arnold. The difference in their prose is the difference between distinction and mere competence. Sherman’s is democratic: it is as if written in shirt-sleeves or talked with the feet on the table, the writer or speaker deliberately putting on easy manners. Note the “It’s-a-plain-man-speaking” effect in the following typical passage at the beginning of Sherman’s essay, _Towards an American Type_: “When I was in college, I used to poke around in the library a good deal looking for books which would take me out of the shallow water of college life into the deep channel of experience, into the serious life of the world. And naturally enough the works of Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a typical Tolstoy novel is, etc.”[63] Lucid writing, of course, but it is not charming: it has none of Arnold’s aristocratic sweetness.
I am going to try to point out a fatal lack of austerity in Sherman, a certain ultimate slackness of mind and purpose. The prose, so lustreless beside Arnold’s, shows that Sherman failed to achieve any of the rarer virtues of verbal deportment: just as clearly one realises that not so superficially, so mushily, could Arnold have defined religion as, in Sherman’s words, “that which binds us and holds us. Religion is that which at heart we do earnestly believe in, whatever it is.” Nor could Arnold, doughty wrestler with himself, so easily drop his hard questions and substitute gentler ones. In the essay quoted from above, Sherman went on to raise the question all great minds have most seriously confronted: “Is life worth living, and for what purpose?” But it did not take him long to say, “Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?”--a serious enough question, but subtly veering the asker away from any tragic vision of life and encouraging him to settle into a limited pattern of behaviour that happens to appeal to his temperament rather than to go forth and lead the great adventure of pursuing perfection.
In his growth Sherman was influenced by the books of three conservative critics, Mr. Paul Elmer More, Mr. Irving Babbitt, and the late W. C. Brownell; and here again his conduct was significant of some lack of desperation in him or of some softening influence on the fibres of his mind. For under the pressure of the ideas of Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt he was a little impatient. They were too austere for his taste, whereas he could not admire Brownell sufficiently. But of the three critics Brownell dealt least in the primary ideas of life: he elaborated with a great deal of fine sense secondary ideas about literature and society. He had, it appears to me, a mind more localised in the nineteenth century than the minds of his two colleagues. And nineteenth-century minded, rather than classical minded, was Stuart P. Sherman: his perennial enthusiasms were for Emerson, Whitman, and Stevenson.