Poetry and Commonplace

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

“ONLY a staff cut from Sophoclean timber will support your lonely dreamer as he makes his way over the marl,” wrote Mr. Francis B. Gummere not long ago;¹ “but the common citizen, who does most of the world’s work, and who has more to do with the future of poetry than a critic will concede, finds his account in certain smooth, didactic, and mainly cheerful verses which appear in the syndicate newspapers, and will never attain a magazine or an anthology. If singing throngs keep rhythm alive, it is this sort of poets that must both make and mend the paths of genius. ... If minor poets and obvious, popular poems ever disappear, and if crowds ever go dumb, then better and best poetry itself will be as dead as King Pandion. No Absent-Minded Beggar, no Recessional.”

Nobody can suppose that Mr. Gummere is here advancing a new gospel of doggerel or a defense of the slipshod. Since, according to his habit elsewhere,² he is considering poetry as a scientific fact, as “emotional rhythmic utterance,” and striving to emphasize the significance of that utterance in its ruder forms, it is natural that his argument should appear to approach an apology for the commonplace. Indeed, he is frank in accepting the word as applicable to the best poetry, if it is applicable at all. “Commonplace is a poor word, ” he says. “Horace gives one nothing else. ” Whatever impatience he manifests toward persons of other minds is due to his sense of the extreme urgency of his theme : that the study of poetry to be intelligent must attain the rank and method of a science. “Poetry, high or low, as product of a human impulse and as a constant element in the life of man, belongs to that history which has been defined of late as ' concrete sociology; ’ and it is on this ground, and not in criticism, that the question of the decline of poetry must be answered.” Mr. Gummere is indignant with critics for not perceiving this : “They exclude from their study of poetry,” he complains, “a good half of the facts of poetry.”

This is a sobering charge. One wishes to be sure that there is reason for throwing such overwhelming stress upon the significance of the social element in poetry. When we have admitted that some sort of emotional rhythmic utterance has always been essential to the popular comfort, and when we have determined by the method which Mr. Gummere suggests that the instinct for such utterance is not likely to grow dull with time, shall we have even paved the way for proof that great poetry will continue to be produced? Yet this is precisely the “old case ” which Mr. Gummere is considering. However academic the question of the decline of poetry may have been, it has never meant anything else, to those who were disposed to be exercised about it, than the decline of great poetry.

Mr. Gummere further urges the application of the sociological method to concrete criticism. Yet when we have gone the length of historical analysis to prove, according to his suggestion, that “Lycidas, as a poem, is the outcome of emotion in long reaches of social progress,” it is not altogether clear what new truth we shall have discovered about the poem or about the poetic function, Necessarily the great poet conserves and epitomizes and perfects ; that is why he is great. And that, since he implies, and acts as spokesman for, a thousand smaller voices heard only by a few and for a day, is why we still find meaning even in “those old hysterics about genius, ” which Mr. Gummere disdains; and why we find it unnecessary to refer every poem, great or small, to whatever mass of data in “concrete sociology. ”

In our doubt as to the propriety or usefulness of the neutral definition of poetry which sociology affords, we may profitably recall that merely literary definition which has hitherto served the world comfortably if unscientifically. One turns perhaps to certain well-remembered passages in the Oxford lectures of Mr. W. J. Courthope, one of the greatest modern expositors of classical criticism. “Poetry,” he says, “ is the art which produces pleasure for the imagination by imitating human actions, thoughts, and passions, in metrical language.” It must, however, produce pleasure not for the coterie or the class, or even the people as a whole, but “pleasure which can be felt by what is best in the people as a whole . . . pleasure such as has been produced by one generation of great poets after another whose work still moves in the reader wonder and delight. ” Naturally, therefore, “the sole authorities in the art of poetry are the great classical poets of the world.” This view of poetry by no means ignores its fundamental relation toward society. “As the end of art is to produce pleasure, poets and all other artists must take into account alike the constitution of the human mind and the circumstances of the society which it is their business to please.” But this truth, stated without qualification, may easily mislead: “Popular taste has, no doubt, a foundation in Nature. . . . But the unrefined instinct of the multitude is, as a rule, in favor of what is obvious and superficial: impatient of reflection, it is attracted by the loud colors and the commonplace sentiment which readily strike the senses or the affections. Observe the popular songs in the Music Halls, the pictorial advertisements on the hoardings, the books on the railway stalls, the lists in the circulating libraries; from these may be divined the level to which the public taste is capable of rising by its own untrained perception. That which is natural in such taste is also vulgar; and if vulgar Nature is to be the standard of Art, nothing but a versatile mediocrity of invention is any longer possible.” The classical critic, that is, would see no hope for poetry in the mere survival of a popular susceptibility for rhythm. Yet if he does not spare contempt for the commonplace and vulgar, he is at great pains to make clear the importance of the universal element in poetry. “The real superiority of the painter or the poet, if we measure by the work of the highest excellence, lies ... in the ability to find expression for imaginative ideas of nature floating unexpressed in the general mind.” “The secret of enduring poetical life lies in individualizing the universal, not in universalizing the individual.”

From this point of view, one reflects, what does Mr. Gummere’s “communal song ” mean to the critical mind ? Taken to include, as seems to be expected, all current attempts at “emotional rhythmic utterance,” it means very little; hardly more than the really considerable public inclination for the banjo and the coon-song would mean to the student of music. At its best, with all possible concession to its virtue of spontaneity and its suggestion of a natural prestige for poetry, it represents only the rude attempt at expressing that universal experience which the individualizing hand of genius is able to express adequately. An instinct for utterance does not in itself constitute or even imply, though it may produce art. There have been nations singularly prone to rhythmic utterance, yet barren of noble poetry. The significance of such a habit of utterance must be little more than sociological. It is, in short, doubtful if any deeply scientific method is likely to affect the general sense that a million failures in poetry (however ingenuous and sincere, however widely listened to even) are of less import to the race than a single success; that to study the mighty poets of the world must be the most probable means of realizing the immense significance of poetry as an element in human life.

II.

Very narrow in range and monotonous in substance is the verse in which many of us common citizens find our account. It is flatly emotional and baldly respectable. It preaches, it pities, it regrets; it is full of the memories of childhood, of innocence, of the old homestead and the song that mother used to sing. At its nadir of quality and perhaps its zenith of influence, one finds it cried over at the vaudeville theatre. It is surprising how sympathetically even a “submerged ” audience will listen to that babbling of green fields which it has never seen.

Here in America this sort of communal song appears to have attained a sort of apotheosis. Not to risk the indiscretion of naming Longfellow in the connection, one may cite aloud the work of Whitcomb Riley, a poet of real powers, who has been content to make very common citizens laugh and cry by quite obvious means. The morale of the case is similar to that of a hypothetical painter with a cultivable talent of a high order who should content himself with drawing crayon portraits for country sitting-rooms. Yet it is hard to judge coldly of the fact. So many persons have read Mr. Riley’s good verse who would never have read his or anybody else’s better verse, that only determined loyalty to an unbiased standard, the standard of the poet’s own possible best, can keep one discontented with the result of his work. Measured by that standard, he is seen to have loitered upon the broad levels of commonplace when he might have dropped his plumb into the depths of universality. It is something to be a virtuoso, even upon the harmonium ; but the instrument has fatal limitations.

Now and then Mr. Riley’s characteristic mood escapes from the vernacular and finds a voice of much lyric delicacy; as in these verses from Our Boyhood Haunts: —

It is worthy of remark that during such momentary lapses into English the writer should incline to the employment of classical allusions and literary fashions of speech. That is a form of revenge which the Muse delights to take upon those who wish to ignore her.

If Mr. Riley approaches his best in moments of emancipation from dialect, the reverse is true of Mr. Paul Lawrence Dunbar. In his Poems of Lowly Life and its companion volume there is much merely graceful echoing of familiar strains. It is in his negro melodies, with their rich and home-felt sympathy, their projection of a racial contour which is of universal interest, that one feels the presence of the quality with which the world in the end finds its account. If this is communal song, it is also something more; it is poetry.

One is not so sure what to say of the verse of Mr. Edwin Markham, who has taken rank of late as a poet of the people. When he does not remember to be full-chestedly democratic, he is remarkably pliable to suggestions from classic literature. When he is not talking about toilers and tyrants, he is quite likely to be chanting of naiads and “Norns.” One is not sure that The Man with the Hoe fails of being a true inspiration. Perhaps one is unfairly prejudiced against the poem by the extraneous fact that the author, after its first success, wrote a magazine article thereon beginning, “I did it! ” and proceeding to describe the manner of its doing, with diagrams. At all events, the dogged force which marked that poem does not reappear elsewhere in his work. The bluntness and simplicity of his didactic manner appear artificial in the bulk. There is, for example, rhetoric but not quite poetry to be sure of in his characterization of Lincoln as

As poetry it must be felt that many of his conceptions are, to use Mr. Courthope’s phrase, mere “Idols of the Fancy.” That is perhaps why one experiences a sudden relief in coming now and again upon a passage from which the didactic spirit is altogether absent, and in which fancy has legitimate play, as in these lines describing a lizard: —

Surely this is a very delicate touch of poetry, as just as it is unpretentious in conception, and as right as it is simple in expression.

Simple justice must admit that the daily press now and then produces verse which, while it may not possess just the quality to commend it to the magazine or to insure it a place in the anthology, is, in one sense or another, beyond the commonplace. The Chicago Tribune is to be congratulated upon having originally printed the verses which make up Mr. Taylor’s recent volume.³ They are far better than most newspaper verse; they contain more sense, and, as a whole, more poetry. The trail of the journalist is sometimes too apparent. There are frequent slips in accuracy and not infrequent lapses in taste, jests not quite far enough from vulgarity, and local hits too palpable for the relish of a second reading. But there are several numbers which are more fit to rank with English light verse of the better class than anything American since the day of H. C. Bunner; there are some admirable satirical bits; and there is a Ballade of Spring’s Unrest from which the third octave especially deserves to be quoted :

Another volume is at hand whose title confesses its origin,⁴ and which contains verse of the “smooth, didactic, and mainly cheerful ” sort in the continued production and popularity of which lies, we are told, hope for the poetry of the future. Here are many such passages as

Or, —

This sort of verse is probably as palatable, and even as immediately profitable, to the common citizen as any verse could be. Nobody can possibly wish to langh at it. Unless to the sociological student of poetry, however, it falls short of special significance; not because the feeling expressed is not sincere and sensible and of universal appeal, but because it is imperfectly individualized : loosely grasped and vaguely uttered. One perceives that this is the real status of the trite and the commonplace, and fancies that when Mr. Gummere chooses Horace as an eminent example of the commonplace in poetry, he is holding the weak thread to the light. For there can be nothing less commonplace than the perfect expression by individual genius of the facts of universal experience: nothing less commonplace, that is, than true poetry.

III.

We may turn for a moment to a recent volume of verse ⁵ in which this feat has been in some manner accomplished ; in which simple and common emotions have been turned to poetry in the literary as well as in the sociological sense of the word. The verse of Ethna Carbery is informed with that passionate sense of race to which the work of the NeoCeltic school owes much of its saliency; a patriotism concerned less with politics than with the conservation of national ideals. It therefore represents the spirit of an ancient folk-poetry, and constitutes the true though fragmentary restoration of one authentic type of communal song. The process is in a sense artificial; but these lyrics, with their tense passion and subtle melancholy, so different from the broader Teutonic pathos and sentiment,evidently utter the poet’s temperament as well as that of her race. She employs an extraordinary variety of metrical forms without appearing to be whimsical. Often by trifling irregularities of rhythm she is able to gain a singular effect of naïve beauty; as in these stanzas from On an Island: —

Often, too, the verse moves with the restless lilt, and the expression takes on the curious figures of color, which are unmistakable marks of race: —

I do not know how the listener to music like this, however bound by the poetical conventions of his own race, can deny that it possesses the genuine lyric rapture. Apart from its appeal as the upwelling of a true poetic impulse, its roothold in a tradition of large significance must give it immunity from the stigma of that poetry of coterie which Mr. Courthope shows to be one of the signs of decadence. It is sad that the first collected work of so delicate a poet should have been published posthumously. The recent death of Mrs. MacManus will be felt as a genuine loss by lovers of poetry.

How difficult it is to carry over into the expression of modern English or American life the free disregard of our established metrical forms which is tolerable in, because in a way indigenous to, the poetry of the Celt is made clear by such work as that of Mr. Bridges.⁶ There is something, it seems, in the immitigable leaven of our Teutonic blood which calls for restraint and conformity, and is disinclined, these qualities lacking, to admit that Horace’s rule has been followed — that the right form of expression has sprung naturally out of a just mode of conception. For example, the form of expression employed in the two pieces of verse which open the present volume seems almost painfully inadequate. Can one imagine the fitness of addressing a dying friend in these tripping staves ? —

Or is it possible to be impressed with the propriety of imputing the measure of “ ’T was the night before Christmas ” to a communication From One Long Dead ? —

Mr. Bridges tells us in his dedicatory lines that he has found his inspiration in Burns, or one might have suspected here a resuscitation of the metrical habit once (but long ago) admired in Thomas Moore. But his forms do not always err upon the side of elaboration :

One is tempted to quote the rest of the piece because it illustrates so admirably the kind of verse the study of which is expected to illuminate our understanding of poetry in the large. Of course Mr. Kipling has been setting the pace for this sort of thing, and a great deal of it is to be looked for by a public which has tolerated The Absent-Minded Beggar. May it lead, in some mysterious way, to the production of many more poems like The Recessional, — a poem, it must be noticed, which owes much of its power to its rich treatment of a simple and conventional metrical form. Mr. Bridges is himself capable of such restraint and such success, as is proved by the charming lines on Stevenson : —

It is a pity that the talent which produced this should so seldom have exerted itself to such an end.

The verse of Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson,⁷ on the other hand, possesses remarkable evenness of quality. Its faults are not of exuberance or carelessness or arbitrariness of form, but of occasional stiffness and over-consciousaess. These defects, however, belong to the quality of careful workmanship which, allied with the quality of sane imagination, produces most good poetry. Certainly the emotional value of Mr. Johnson’s work is seldom compromised by his adroitness as a metrist. He does not invent metres, he employs them, and with exceptional skill. The Winter Hour, his longest flight, is cast into a simple measure to which he gives much flexibility and grace: —

One imagines how instinctively the poet may have chosen the Heine-like measure of his Farewell to Italy, to fit the temper of brooding retrospect, so like Heine, which he has to express: —

Nor does it appear that there is anything artificial in the delicate seventeenth-century suggestion which lingers about the very sweetest and most spirited of his lyrics, Love in the Calendar, which it would be a pleasure to quote entire: —

It is necessary to speak with more reservation of Mr. Johnson’s didactic and occasional verses. His Poems on Public Events, Songs of Liberty, and the like, many of them ring not false but, compared with his other verse, a little thin. The full ardor of his consciousness is bestowed upon conceptions less diffused. He has done more in creating such a phrase as “grass half-robin high ” than in writing many poems upon Dewey at Manila or The Voice of Webster. But this is in accordance with a law which governs all but the few supreme masters of song; for it is only they who can with equal success touch the stops of various quills; who are able always, in whatever mood or upon whatever plane, to conceive justly and to express rightly; to create, that is, the noble and rare flower of genius which the world will for some time continue to style Poetry.

H. W. Boynton.