Part 20

The serene and humble mould Does in herself all selves enfold-- Kingdoms, destinies, and creeds, Great dreams, and dauntless deeds, Science that metes the firmament, The high, inflexible intent Of one for many sacrificed-- Plato’s brain, the heart of Christ;

* * * * *

Out of the earth the poem grows Like the lily, or the rose; And all man is, or yet may be, Is but herself in agony Toiling up the steep ascent Toward the complete accomplishment When all dust shall be, the whole Universe, one conscious soul.

These lines by John Hall Wheelock epitomise the thought that had been the main inspiration of the nineteenth century. Despite their regular metrical form, with its reminiscence of Emerson, we recognise in them the ecstatic evolutionary naturalism of Walt Whitman.

Indeed, it was the spirit of Whitman, more than any other, that presided over our “poetic renascence.” Not, of course, that all the poets who made their appearance in those years were akin to him. Frost, for instance, was hardly more like Whitman than he was like Pope; consciously, in his living and in his poetry, he was facing and he has continued to move in just the opposite direction. Nor perhaps in the work of Masters or of Robinson is the relation to Whitman at once apparent, for superficially neither the Spoon River Anthology, that sardonic record of stunted human growths, nor Robinson’s sombre studies of the thwarted lives of his New Englanders suggest the tolerance, the breadth and human warmth of the older poet’s sympathies. But the analysis of these unfortunate victims of a repressive and unhumane morality (for such is the way the poetry of both writers was commonly described, and such, in one aspect, it is) was really in line with Whitman’s gospel of emotional emancipation, as well as with the new direction given to psychology by Freud and Jung. In the work of Lindsay and Sandburg, and notably in that of the far less original Oppenheim (whose disappearance from current collections is itself significant of the change that has taken place), the influence of Whitman was patent. All the spokesmen and contemporary critics of the movement, from Amy Lowell (1917) to Bruce Weirick (1924), with varying degrees of emphasis, stress Whitman’s primacy in American literature. He had had his lovers and disciples before, but now for the first time a group of American poets could give him whole-hearted welcome with no inner abashment to overcome. Throughout the earlier productions of the movement, even in the poems of the Imagists, whose theory and practice of verse were so different from his own, is diffused the vibrant spirit of Walt Whitman. It is experienced as a certain buoyancy and expectancy of mood, and most characteristically as an underlying trust in a life-force which is felt to be working here in America to high, unforeseen ends.

It would be an over-simplification, but somewhere near the heart of the matter, to say that the presence we are most aware of in the poetry of to-day is not Walt Whitman, but Thomas Hardy--his desolating irony, at least, if not his artistic and personal elevation. These younger poets accept, but coldly and without enthusiasm, the account which contemporary science offers of the universe and of the human make-up, and they are as hostile to the glowing affirmations of the great romantics as they are to the evasions and tepidity of the Victorians. Perhaps this is but an inversion, a different guise, of that restless and changeable temper which we call romanticism, but to me at least its emergence seems to be more significant than were any of the varied energies released by the last poetic movement. This new spirit is not more characteristic of poetry, of course, than of other expressions of the age. To some extent, though less here than abroad, it is an after-effect of the war--the inability of nervous organisations overstrained by the excitements of those years to respond to normal stimuli. It may be briefly described as a despair of achieving any reading of life in its totality which will be tolerable in the light of all we know and feel. “In the course of a few centuries,” writes Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch in The Modern Temper, “[man’s] knowledge, and hence the universe of which he finds himself an inhabitant, has been completely revolutionised, but his instincts and his emotions have remained, relatively at least, unchanged. He is still, as he always was, adjusted to the orderly, purposeful, humanised world which all peoples unburdened by experience have figured to themselves, but that world no longer exists.” This modern sense of frustration differs from states of disillusion or pessimism experienced in the past in two respects. It is, for one thing, more widespread, producing a considerable body of poetry of sheer negation, turning some writers to mere elaboration of surfaces and appearances, and making itself felt as an undercurrent, now cynical, now passionate, in much writing which seems superficially to be almost free of philosophical implications. And secondly, this spirit of denial is a more positive and uncompromising thing than we have known in the past. Not only is it unable to effect any synthesis of its intelligence and its emotional promptings; it has come to believe that such a synthesis is in the nature of things impossible. It grows “more and more likely,” continues Mr. Krutch, “that must remain an ethical animal in a universe which contains no ethical element.” His dilemma is that he cannot either feel as his intelligence bids him or think as his emotions would have him. Even the highest of the personal emotions, love itself, which had somehow eluded the cold touch of nineteenth-century science, has not been able to withstand the psycho-analysis of the twentieth. “Have you not heard,” asks the lady in Cavender’s House,

“Have you not heard yet, anywhere, death-bells ringing For Love and poor Romance? Biologists And bolshevists are ringing them like mad-- So loud that Love, we’re told, will soon be lost With dodos, dinosaurs, and pterodactyls.”

Specifically, a feeling is abroad that poetry is at some kind of crisis or turning-point, and there are even predictions that poetry of a sort that the past would recognise as such cannot continue much longer to be produced.

The poetry of T. S. Eliot has been praised for its seizing of just this aspect of the modern situation, the sense of frustration, of insignificance. “The passions which swept through the once major poets,” writes Mr. Krutch, “no longer awaken any profound response, and only in the bleak, tortuous complexities of a T. S. Eliot does [the present age] find its moods given adequate expression.” Love-making carried on with an accompanying sense of its futility and ridiculousness, an acquaintance with art and poetry which serves only to confirm misgivings as to their relevancy for us to-day, the employment of religious symbols to arouse a poor mirthless mockery--in such experiences our young intellectuals find mirrored the age and body of their time. The cryptic character of the writing, the sometimes arbitrary connection between one image and the next, the casual allusions to one person’s recondite reading, are all indications of the contemporary sense of the individual’s isolation. The broken rhythms, the fragmentariness of the scenes or movements, the deliberate foregoing of any rational principle of organisation, reflect the feeling of the fragmentariness of life itself, the modern inability to effect any kind of integration of experience. And this, we are told by some, is the only kind of poetry which an honest and sensitive mind in an age like ours can be expected to produce.

Mr. Eliot, though no longer belonging even nominally to American literature, is worth attention because of his present high reputation in intellectual circles. He has written literary criticism of a kind especially needed at the present time, based as it is on a wide knowledge of literature, informed by a delicate taste, and guided by severe yet humane standards. And in his poetry he has shown himself capable of finding a comedy of the mind in these hesitations and inhibitions of modernity,--as in the early “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” By the haunting, individual rhythms of his poems alone, we are apprised of an exceptional poetic endowment. Yet Mr. Eliot’s literary output, poetry and prose, constitutes, to my mind, one of the most arresting paradoxes of this paradoxical age: an advocate of the sterner disciplines of the past (“classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”), who gives to these causes all the organising power of a firm intelligence, and is content to let his poetry express chiefly the states of confusion, doubt, faintness, with which the positive principles of his thought have had to wrestle.

“We are the hollow men, We are the stuffed men.”

In a recent essay Mr. Eliot has ventured the opinion that a great event in the intellectual world would be the conversion of Professor Irving Babbitt to Roman or Anglo-Catholicism, but, he concludes regretfully, such a consummation, though devoutly to be wished, is hardly likely, for Mr. Babbitt “knows too much.” Perhaps an even more salutary conversion, in its immediate effects upon other poets, would be Mr. Eliot’s compassing, in his creative work, of those genuinely classical values of which, in his critical writing, he shows such fine apprehension. For a transformation of that kind, one need not fear that any man of letters knows too much. One may at least entertain the hope that Mr. Eliot’s permanent reputation as a poet is not going to lie in the fact that he has voiced, more completely than any one else in verse, the confusion and disillusionment of this post-war generation.

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.” 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.” 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 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. 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.’” 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

Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers.

“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.”

A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, 1927, p. 125.

From Harmonium, by Wallace Stevens, 1923. Reprinted by and with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised publishers.