Part 12

"I certainly do believe that literature has lost through the poverty of poets," said Mr. Robinson. "I don't believe in poverty. I never did. I think it is good for a poet to be bumped and knocked around when he is young, but all the difficulties that are put in his way after he gets to be twenty-five or thirty are certain to take something out of his work. I don't see how they can do anything else.

"Some time ago you asked me," said Mr. Robinson, "how I accounted for our difficulty in making a correct estimate of the poetry of one's own time. The question is a difficult one. I don't even say that it has an answer. But the solution of the thing seems to me to be related to what I said about the quality of finality that seems to exist in all real poetry. Finality seems always to have had a way of not obtruding itself to any great extent."

_LET POETRY BE FREE_

JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY

Mrs. Lionel Marks--or Josephine Preston Peabody, to call her by the name which she has made famous--is a poet whose tendency has always been toward democracy. From _The Singing Leaves_, her first book of lyrics, to _The Piper_ (the dramatic poem which received the Stratford-on-Avon prize in 1910), and _The Wolf of Gubbio_, the poetic representation of events in St. Francis's life in her latest published book, she has chosen for her theme not fantastic and rare aspects of nature, nor the new answers of her own emotions, but things that are common to all normal mankind--such as love and religion. Also, without seeming to preach, she is always expressing her love for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and although she never dwells upon the overworked term, she is as devoted an adherent of the brotherhood of man as was William Morris.

Therefore I was eager to learn whether or not she held the opinion--often expressed during the past months--that poetry is becoming more democratic, less an art practised and appreciated by the chosen few. Also I wanted to know if she saw signs of this democratization of poetry in the development of free verse, or _vers libre_, as those who write it prefer to say, in the apparently growing tendency of poets to give up the use of rhyme and rhythm.

"Certainly, poetry is steadily growing more democratic," said Mrs. Marks. "More people are writing poetry to-day than fifty years ago, and the appreciation of poetry is more general. Most poets of genuine calling are writing now with the world in mind as an audience, not merely for the entertainment of a little literary cult.

"But I do not think that the _vers libre_ fad has any connection with this tendency, or with the development of poetry at all. Indeed, I do not think that the cult is growing; we hear more of it in the United States than we did a year or two ago, but that is chiefly because London and Paris have outworn its novelty, so the _vers libristes_ concentrate their energies on Chicago and New York.

"I love some 'free verse.' Certainly, there may be times when a poet finds he can express his idea or his emotion better without rhyme and rhythm than with them. But verse that is ostentatiously free--free verse that obviously has been made deliberately--that is a highly artificial sort of writing, bears no more relation to literature than does an acrostic. Neither the themes nor the methods of those who call themselves _vers libristes_ are democratic; they are, in the worst sense of the word, the sense which came into use at the time of the French Revolution, aristocratic.

"The canon of the _vers libristes_ is essentially aristocratic. They contend, absurdly enough, that all traditional forms of rhyme and rhythm constitute a sort of bondage, and therefore they arbitrarily rule them out. Not for them are the fetters that bound Shelley's spirit to the earth! Also they arbitrarily rule out what they call, with their fondness for labels, the 'sociological note,' 'didacticism,' 'meanings'--any ideas or emotions, in fact, that may be called communal or democratic.

"My own canon is that all themes are fit for poetry and that all methods must justify themselves. If I may be permitted to make a clumsy wooden-toy apothegm I would say that poetry is rhythmic without and within. If we turn Carlyle's sometimes cloudy prose inside out we find that it has a silver lining of poetry.

"Neither can I understand why the _vers libristes_ believe that their sort of writing is new. Leopardi wrote what would be called good _imagisme_, although the _imagistes_ do not seem to be aware of the fact, and the theory that rhyme is undesirable in poetry has appeared sporadically time and again in the history of poetry. When Sir Philip Sidney was alive there were pedants who argued against the use of rhyme, and some of them confuted their own arguments by writing charming lyrics in the traditional manner. By dint of reading the fine eye-cracking print in the Globe Edition of Spenser I found that the author of the _Faerie Queen_ at one time took seriously Gabriel Harvey's arguments against rhyme and made an unbelievably frightful experiment in rhymeless verse--as bad as the parodists of our band-wagon.

"The other day I asked some one in the Greek department of Harvard how to read a fragment of Sappho's that I wanted to teach my children to say. He said that no one nowadays could know how certain of Sappho's poems really should be read, because the music for them had been lost, and they were all true lyrics, meant to be sung and sung by Sappho to music of her own making. So you see that poets who avowedly make verses that can appeal only to the eye, successions of images, in which the position of the words on the page is of great importance, believe that they are the successors of poets whose work was meant not to be read, but to be sung, whose verses fitted the regular measure of music.

"As I said before," said Mrs. Marks, smiling, "I have no objection to free verse when it is a spontaneous expression. But I do object to free verse when it is organized into a cult that denies other freedoms to other poets! And I object to the bigotry of some of the people who are trying to impose free verse upon an uninterested world.

"And also I object to the unfairness of some of the advocates of free verse. When they compare free verse, and what I suppose I must call chained verse, they take the greatest example of unrhymed poetry that they can find--the King James version of the Book of Job, perhaps--and say: 'This is better than "Yankee Doodle." Therefore, free verse is better than traditional verse.'

"You see," said Mrs. Marks, "the commonest thing there is, I may say the most democratic thing, is the rhythm of the heart-beat. A true poet cannot ignore this. At the greatest times in his life, when he is filled with joy or despair, or when he has a sense of portent, man is aware of his heart, of its beat, of its recurrent tick, tick; he is aware of the rhythm of life. When we are dying, perhaps the only sense that remains with us is the sense of rhythm--the feeling that the grains of sand are running, running, running out.

"The pulse-beat is a tremendous thing. It is the basis of all that men have in common. All life is locked up in its regularly recurrent rhythm. And it is that rhythm that appears in our love-songs, our war-songs, in all the poetry of the human cycle from lullabies to funeral chants. In the great moments of life men feel that they must be sharing, that they must have something in common with other men, and so their emotions crystallize into the ritual of rhythm, which is the most democratic thing that there is.

"Primitive poetry, poetry that comes straight from the hearts of the people, sometimes circulating for generations without being committed to paper, is strongly traditional. The convention of regular rhyme and rhythm is never absent. What could be more conventional and more democratic than the old ballad, with its recurrent refrain in which the audience joined? Centuries ago in the Scotch Highlands the ballad-makers, like the men who wrote the 'Come-all-ye's' in our great-grandfather's time, used regular rhyme and rhythm. And if these poets were not democratic, then there never was such a thing as a democratic poet."

"But is it not true," I asked, "that Whitman is considered the most democratic poet of his day, and that his avoidance of rhyme and regular rhythm is advanced as proof of his democracy?"

"Whitman," said Mrs. Marks, "was a democrat in principle, but not in poetic practice. He loved humanity, but he still waits to reach his widest audience because his verse lacks strongly stressed, communal music. The only poems which he wrote that really reached the hearts of the people quickly are those which are most nearly traditional in form--_When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloomed_ and _Captain, My Captain!_ in which he used rhyme.

"You see, nothing else establishes such a bond with memory as rhyme.

"Did you ever think," said Mrs. Marks, suddenly, "that the truest exuberance of life always expresses itself rhythmically? Children are generous with the most intricate rhythms; they do not eat ice-cream in the disorderly grown-up way; they eat it in a pattern, turning the saucer around and around; they skit alternate flagstones or every third step on the stairway. Because they are overflowing with life they express themselves in rhythm. _Vers libre_ is too grown-up to be the most vital poetry; one of the ways in which the poet must be like a little child is in possessing an exuberance of life. His life must overflow.

"The poets especially remember that Christ said, 'I am come that ye might have life and that ye might have it more abundantly.'

"The rhythm of life," said Mrs. Marks, thoughtfully. "The rhythm of life. Who is conscious of his heart-beats except at the great moments of life, and who is unconscious of them then? The music of poetry is the witness of that intense moment when there is discovered to man or woman, when there reverberates through his brain and being, the tremendous rhythm and refrain whereby we live."

Mrs. Marks has no patience with those who use the term "sociological" in depreciation of all poetry that is not intensely subjective and personal.

"There are some critics," she said, "who would condemn the Lord's Prayer as 'sociological' because it begins 'Our Father' instead of 'My Father.'

"The true poet must be a true democrat; he must, if he can, share with all the world the vision that lights him; he must be in sympathy with the people. The war has made a great many European poets aware of this fact. Think how the war changed Rupert Brooke, for instance? He had been a most aristocratic poet, making poems, some of which could only repel minds less in love with the fantastic. But he shared the great emotion of his countrymen, and so he wrote out of his deeply wakened, sudden simplicity those sonnets which they all can understand and must forever cherish.

"The war will help make poetry. It has swept away the fads and cults from Europe; they find a peaceful haven in the United States, but they will not live as dogmas. In the democracy that is soon to come may all 'isms' founder and lose themselves! And may all true freedoms come into their own, with the maker, his mind and his tools."

_THE HERESY OF SUPERMANISM_

CHARLES RANN KENNEDY

"But, of course," said Charles Rann Kennedy, violently (he says most things rather violently), "you understand that the war's most important effect on literature was clearly evident long before the war began!"

I did not understand this statement, and said so. Thereupon the author of _The Servant in the House_ and _The Terrible Meek_ said:

"We have so often been told that great events cast their shadows before, that the tremendous truth of the phrase has ceased to impress us. The war which began in August, 1914, exercised a tremendous influence over the mind of the world in 1913, 1912, 1911, and 1910. The great wave of religious thought which swept over Europe and America during those years was caused by the approach of the war. The tremendous pacifist movement--not the weak, bloodless pacifism of the poltroon, but the heroic, flaming pacifism of the soldier-hearted convinced of sin--was a protest against the menacing injustice of the war; it was the world's shudder of dread.

"The literature of the first decade of the twentieth century was more thoroughly and obviously influenced by the war than will be that of the decade following. Think of that amazing quickening of the conscience of the French nation, a quickening which found expression in the novels of Rene Bazin, the immortal ballads of Francis Jammes, and in the work of countless other writers! These people were preparing themselves and their fellow-countrymen for the mighty ordeal which was before them.

"It is blasphemous to say that the war can only affect things that come after it; to say that is to attempt to limit the powers of God. There are, of course, some writers who can only feel the influence of a thing after it has become evident; after they have carefully studied and absorbed it. But there are others, the manikoi, the prophetic madmen, who are swayed by what is to happen rather than by what has happened. I'm one of them.

"The war held me in its spell long before the German troops crossed Belgian soil. I wrote my _The Terrible Meek_ by direct inspiration from heaven in Holy Week, 1912.

"I put that in," said Mr. Kennedy (who looks very much like Gilbert K. Chesterton's _Man-alive_), suddenly breaking off the thread of his discourse, "not only because I know that it is the absolute truth, but because of the highly entertaining way in which it is bound to be misinterpreted.

"New York's dramatic critics, the Lord Chamberlain of England, the military authorities of Germany and Great Britain--all these people were charmingly unanimous in finding _The Terrible Meek_ blasphemous, villainous, poisonous. Even the New York MacDowell Club, after two stormy debates, decided to omit all mention of _The Terrible Meek_ from its bulletin. Perhaps this was not entirely because the play was 'sacrilegious'; the club may possibly have been influenced by the fact that its author was a loud person with long hair, who told unpleasant truths in reputable gatherings. And copies of the published book of the play, which were accompanied by friendly letters from the author, were refused by every monarch now at war in Europe!

"But in 1914 and 1915 _The Terrible Meek_ suddenly found, to its own amazement, that it had become a respectable play! Its connection with the present war became evident. It has been the subject of countless leading articles; it has been read, and even acted, in thousands of churches. On the occasion of the first production of the despised play in New York City, my wife and I received a small pot of roses from a girls' school which we sometimes visit. In due time this was planted by the porch of our summer home in Connecticut. This year--three years only after its planting--the rose-tree covers three-quarters of the big porch, and last summer it bore thousands of blooms. Now these things are a parable!

"No, the Lord does not have to wait until the beginnings of mighty wars for them vitally to influence the literature of the world. Upon some of us He places the burden of the coming horror years before.

"Although I am and always have been violently opposed to war, I cannot help observing what this war has already commenced to do for literature. It is killing Supermanism--and I purposely call it by that name to distinguish it from the mere actual doctrine that Nietzsche may or may not have taught. The damnable heresy, as it historically happened among us, was already beginning to influence very badly most of our young writers. Clever devilism caught the trick of it too easily. Now, heresy is sin always and everywhere; and this heresy was a particularly black and deadly kind of sin. It ate into the very heart of our life.

"And yet there was a reason, almost an excuse, for the power which the Superman idea got over the minds of writers after Bernard Shaw's first brilliant and engaging popularization of it. And the excuse is that Supermanism, with its emphasis on strength and courage and life, was to a great extent a healthy and almost inevitable reaction from the maudlin milk-and-water sort of theology and morals that had been apologetically handed out to us by weak-kneed religious teachers.

"We had too much of the 'gentle Jesus' of the Sunday-school. In our maze of evil Protestantisms, we had lost sight of the real Son of God who is Jesus Christ. We had lost the terrible and lovely doctrine of the wrath of the Lamb.

"And so a great many writers turned to Supermanism with a shout of relief. They were sick of milk and water, and this seemed to be strong wine. But Supermanism is heresy, and it rapidly spread over the world, most perniciously influencing all intellectual life.

"And there were so many things to help Supermanism! There was the general acceptance of the doctrine of biological necessity as an argument for war--Bernhardi actually used that phrase, I believe--the idea that affairs of the spirit are determined exteriorly. There was the acceptance of various extraordinary interpretations of Darwin's theory of evolution! Every little man called himself a scientist, and took his own little potterings-about very seriously. Everything had to be a matter of observation, these little fellows said; they would believe only what they saw. They didn't know that real scientists always begin _a priori_, that real scientists always know the truth first and then set about to prove it.

"Well, all these people helped the heresy of Supermanism along. But the people who helped it along chiefly were the apologetic Christians, who should have combated it with fire and sword. It was helped along by the sort of Christian who calls himself 'liberal' and 'progressive,' the sort of Christian who says, 'Of course, I'm not orthodox.' When any one says that to me, I always answer him in the chaste little way which so endears me to my day and generation: 'Hell, aren't you? I hope I am!'

"This sort of so-called Christian helps Supermanism in two ways. In the first place, the 'progressive' Christians are great connoisseurs of heresy, they simply love any new sort of blasphemous philosophy, whether it comes from Germany or Upper Tooting. They love to try to assimilate all the new mad and wicked ideas, and graft them on Christianity. I suppose it's their idea of making the Lord Jesus Christ up to date and attractive. They love to try to engrave pretty patterns on the Rock of Ages. And Supermanism was to them a new and alluring pattern.

"Of course a Supermanism might be worked out on strictly Christian lines, the Superman in that case being the Christ. But that is not the way in which the theory has historically worked out. No! Mr. Superman as we've actually known him in the world recently is the Beast that was taken, and with him the false prophets that wrought miracles before him, with which he had deceived them that had received the mark of the Beast and them that had worshiped his image. And these, in the terrible symbolism of St. John, you will remember, got fire and brimstone for their pains! As now!

"Then there was your Christian Supermanism that tried to get up a weak little imitation of the wrath of the Lamb. This was your bastard by theatricality and popularity out of so-called muscular Christianity. Not the virile 'muscular Christianity' of Charles Kingsley, mind you--a power he won almost alone, by blood and tears; but the 'safe' thing of the after generation, the 'all things to all men'--when success was well assured. This is your baseball Christianity, the Christianity of the 'punch,' of the piled-up heap of dollars, of the commercially counted 'conversions' and the rest of the blasphemies! Christ deliver us from it, if needs be, even by fire!

"Well, Supermanism cast its shadow over all forms of literary expression. The big and the little mockers all fell under its spell--they had their fling at Christianity in their novels, their plays, their poems. In the novel Supermanism was evident not so much in direct attacks on Christianity as in a brutal and pitiless realism. Perhaps some of this hard realism was a natural reaction from the eye-piping sentimentality of some of the Victorian writers. But most of it was merely Supermanism in fiction--pessimism, egotism, fatalism, cruelty.

"One thing to be said for the Christian Scientists, the Mental Healers, the New Thought people generally, is that they did a real service through all this bad time by refusing to recognize any such heresy as biological determination as applied to things spiritual. They really did teach man's freedom up there in the heavens where he properly belongs. They refused to be bound by the earth, and all the appearances and the exterior causes thereof. Their Superman, if they ever used the phrase, was at least the Healer, the spirit spent for others, not for self.

"If you were to ask me what were the war's most conspicuous effects on literature just at present, I would say conviction of sin, repentance and turning to God. There can be no suggestion of Supermanism in our literature now. We have rediscovered the Christian Virtues. If a man writes something about blond-beasting through the world for his own good, all we have to do is to stick up in front of his eyes a crucifix. For the world has seen courage and self-abnegation of the kind that Christ taught--it has seen men throw their lives away. The war has shown the world that the man who will throw away his life is braver and stronger and greater than the man who plunges forward to safety over the lives of others. The world has learned that he who loses his life shall gain it.

"The war has thrown a clear light upon Christianity, and now all the little apologetic 'progressive' Christians see that the world had never reacted against orthodox Christianity as such, but only against the bowelless unbelief which masqueraded as Christianity. We have had so many ministers who talked about Christ as they would have talked about kippered herrings--even with less enthusiasm. But now any one who speaks or writes about Christianity after this will have to know that he has to do with something terribly real.

"Of course, during the war the only people who can write about it are those who are in the red-hot period of youth. Young men of genius write in times of stress. The war forces genius to flower prematurely--that is how we got the noble sonnets of Rupert Brooke.

"And after the war will come to the making of literature the man who has conquered pain and agony. And that is the real Superman, the Christian Superman, the Superman who has always been the normal ideal of the world. Carlyle's Superman was nearer the truth than was Nietzsche's, for Carlyle's Superman idea was grounded in courage and sacrifice and love; his Superman was some one worth fighting for and dying for. And the war is showing us that this is the true Superman, if we want to save the world for nobler ends.

"And the war, I believe, will do away with the tommy-rotten objection to 'message' in literature. Don't misunderstand me. Of course, we all object to the stupid 'story with a purpose' in the Sunday-school sense of that phrase. We don't want literature used as a sugar-coating around the illuminating lesson that God loves little Willie because he fed the dicky-birds and didn't say 'damn'! Yet we want literature to awake again and be as always in the great days--a message. Literature must be a direct message from the heart of the author to the heart of the world. The _Prometheus Vinctus_ was such a message. So also the _Antigone_. All Greek drama was.