Politics and the Poet: A Prophecy

by J. E. SPINGARN

INTRODUCTION

IN the spring of 1001, Joel Elias Spingarn emerged from his retirement and gave a series of six lectures at the New School for Social Research in New York. Here, published for the first time, is the fourth of these lectures.

Spingarn is perhaps only a name to the generation that is now bearing arms; but he deserves to be far more than that; for both his thought and his example have something to give a country that is emerging from the illusions and corruptions against which he valiantly fought. When I first came upon his writings, in 1918, he was a major in the United States Army; extraordinarily distinguished for a soldier in active service because his name was attached to a new doctrine in aesthetics. But unlike the weaker spirits of his generation, he did not rebel against the fate that brought him into the war: he gloried in it, “ There is this to be said for the military life,” he wrote in a private letter in 1918, “that it makes you realize as nothing else does how much your country means to you, and to love anything with your whole soul is an experience worth while.”

Born in 1875, Spingarn began his career as a professor of comparative literature under George Woodberry. He was one of the most brilliant young professors who had ever appeared at Columbia; indeed, his first book, on Italian criticism in the Renaissance, is still a classic text, though it was published when he was but twenty-four. Coming under the spell of Theodore Roosevelt, Spingarn became ambitious to serve his country politically: he turned from teaching to politics, ran for Congress, was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and busied himself, in his beloved Dutchess County, with the improvement of rural life.

When the World War broke out, Spingarn, with his sense of the political moment and his desire to be an actor in history, not a mere spectator, foresaw America’s inevitable participation in the conflict and deliberately prepared himself to take an active part. In 1915 he was among the first to enroll in the newly founded officers’ training camps. The same zeal he had applied to literary research served him well as a soldier: so excellently did he master the art of commanding men and waging war that he was one of two to be graduated from Madison Barracks with the highest rank possible, that of major.

I emphasize the practical side of Spingarn’s career because this throws a light upon his thought. He incarnated and lived his own philosophic doctrines; indeed, his published works in the fields of aesthetics, criticism, philosophy, and poetry do only partial justice to him. Only by viewing his life as a whole does one understand his greatness, or the indications of his greatness.

In 1924 Spingarn was crippled by an illness which had first overtaken him in the midst of active military service. This laid him low for a couple of years and reduced the scope and intensity of his later activities. I met him first a few years before this, in those biweekly sessions that Harold Stearns conducted for the symposium called Civilization in the United States. During the next eighteen years our intimacy, as friends and neighbors, deepened; but I confess that, up to the end of the nineteen-twenties, I shared the weaknesses of my generation in failing to understand what was profound and fundamental in his thought.

For one brought up in the liberal tradition, Colonel Spingarn’s pessimism about the immediate future was repulsive. Far better, however, than any other American since Henry Adams, Spingarn understood the nature of the present upheaval and foresaw the worst. At a time when his contemporaries complacently refused even to look at the seismograph, he read its warnings unflinchingly and interpreted them intelligently. “You liberals think,” he said to me as early as 1928, “that your liberal and pacifist world, with its peace treaties and disarmament conferences and material improvements, will last forever. I read history differently. You pacifists are preparing the way for bloodier wars. I predict that you will live to see the restoration of caste, and even slavery.” At the time, that prediction seemed to me only a morbid phantasm: the by-product, no doubt, of personal frustrations. But I have lived to see both caste and slavery come back in the countries dominated by the Nazis; I know now his diagnosis was correct and my youthful hopes were false.

Spingarn’s philosophy unfortunately had small effect upon my generation. In retrospect one can well understand how dismaying it must have been for him to address us, as he did in his Manifesto to the Younger Generation, published in the Freeman in 1922, or in his lectures at the New School, and still get no response. No wonder his pride widened the distance between us; no wonder his contempt was ill-concealed; no wonder his spiritual withdrawal became more complete, so that, toward the end of his life, this soldier and thinker was known throughout the world as the chief authority on — clematis!

When Spingarn prepared the New School lectures on Literature and the New Era in 1931 he was ready, I am sure, to come back more actively into literary life. But the needful response on the part of those he sought to influence was lacking; his audiences were meager; the younger poets, philosophers, and critics did not enthusiastically crowd around him. Some sense of his own disappointment may still be read in the painful reports of the question-and-answer period at the end of each lecture.

All these lectures contain brilliant fragments of Spingarn’s thoughts; but the only one to which the stenotypist did anything like justice is that which is herewith published. At their best, these words, of course, are only a bare abstraction of the living voice; they lack the accompanying gesture, animation, presence, inner authority of the actual speaker. The reader must picture the man himself, nearing sixty, slim, erect, austere, with dark brown eyes that would ignite under the first spark of thought: a man impetuous and intense, proud as Dante and somehow looking as one feels Dante must have looked. A poet who had known the life of action; an active man who had known pain, solitude, deprivation, isolation; a philosopher who, like Socrates or Descartes, could still lead an army and who was capable of advancing resolutely in the face of the enemy, without faltering because no one followed; such a man was J. E. Spingarn.

In Spingarn’s failure to command the support and allegiance of his contemporaries there was the foretaste of a greater collective debacle. For the generation that failed to understand his message met an ignominious fate: it followed the political confidence men, the ignoble fabricators of cowardly hopes and base illusions, the people who sought to buy peace with appeasement, to achieve security at the price of sanctioning injustice, to win wars without fighting them: people who preferred not to face the grim realities of the Nazi attack on civilization and who hated those who faced them far more than they could bring themselves to hate the vilest evils of Nazidom.

This generation did not keep faith with itself because it lacked the will truly to live. Is it any wonder that our country committed its safety to generals and admirals equally inert to reality, equally a prey to moral paralysis, equally unable to understand that the Axis powers were already at war with the United States long before Pearl Harbor and had actually won the first decisive battle by seizing Indo-China? Colonel Spingarn was fortunate: he died in 1939 before he beheld the full extent of America’s political weakness and America’s moral shame. He did not know that the American people would face a catastrophe that called for the boldest and most resolute action with the words “ Someone’s rocking my dream boat” on their lips.

All the more, however, are Spingarn’s thought and example an essential gift to the present generation, which must now, in multiplied and prolonged agonies, atone lor its shallow philosophy, its moral irresponsibility, its sinister and self-defeating isolationism. Events have given a new vitality to Spingarn’s theory of the relation of poetry to politics; even in matters like the understanding of the nature of Russian patriotism under communist leadership, he uttered an unpopular truth long before either the official communists or the anti-Marxians understood its import.

In making this lecture ready for publication, I have followed Spingarn’s own advice to translators. Though I have kept to the letter wherever possible, I have also made bold elisions and transpositions whenever necessary, to preserve the spirit of his utterance. For the sake of completing an unfinished thought I have made two additions of my own: these are in italics. The rest stands as it should: J. E. Spingarn’s last will and testament to a generation that at last must gather its courage and follow his example.

LEWIS MUMFORD

WHEN I was a boy I was profoundly thrilled by two beautiful stanzas in Spenser’s Faërie Queene, in which the poet described the ideal of chivalric honor. Because he belonged to the Renaissance he conceived of it as effort, either intellectual or practical — the effort of a man out in the world struggling to right wrongs, or the profound student in his study thinking out his thoughts or writing his poems. All my life these lines have in some way consciously or unconsciously influenced me, perhaps sent me out on many quests for which I was unfitted. But something that the poet had to give became definitely part of my life. One of the stanzas, as I remember, went in this fashion (Spenser is speaking of honor): —

Now there is something in those lines that seems to be missing from all the poetry of the last thirty or forty or fifty years, perhaps all the poetry since the Romantic era. What seems to be lacking is what I call, in the largest meaning of the word, the political sense.

I know that politics are out of fashion today among the intelligentsia of the world. We are told that politics no longer count, that the important thing today is economics. But the truth is that poetry and philosophy and religion and politics are the four noblest occupations of men, and that all of us who have not some profound realization of the meaning of each one of them misses something from the life of the spirit.

Now, poetry and philosophy and religion belong to the realm of theory. And I take politics as the highest form representative of the practical spirit. That element of utility in life which is present in every act assumes its noblest form in politics. I wish to make clear that polities is a spiritual act exactly in the same sense in which poetry and religion and philosophy are spiritual acts.

If you will look back at the literature of the last fifty or perhaps even one hundred years, but especially since the middle of the nineteenth century, you will observe, I think, a profound distaste on the part of poets for what I call politics, from the French symbolists of the early part of the second half of the nineteenth century to all the writers that bulk largest in our own imagination today: Valéry, Proust, Joyce — all the rest of them. You will find this distaste for the practical, and especially this loss of a political sense. What is the trouble?

If you examine any period of decadence in history, any period when there was a drop in the creative spirit of men, you will find that it was accompanied by a tepid love of country.

Now I know there is nothing more unpopular today among the intelligentsia of the world than the idea of love of country. And yet if you will look at these periods of decadence you will see this lack of love of country is a symptom of a lack of love of everything else, because profoundly a real and noble love of country symbolizes all human activity. It symbolizes love of family and home, love of the daily task, religion, politics, the whole universality of which the individual is a part. For virtue is never solitary: it takes part in the conflicts of the world. And there is no virtue when a man does not play some part, if only in the imagination, within a larger world. And so the love of country, if it is really a pure one, symbolizes the whole activity within the soul in its broadening out into a larger universality. In other words, it is a form, and one of the greatest forms, in which moral enthusiasm displays itself. And to be without a love of country is to be without real moral enthusiasm, and therefore decadent.

So profoundly is this true that the very people who most despise the concept of love of country, if they were really animated by a great faith and a moral enthusiasm, would develop it. And there is no better example of that today than Russia. The men in control of Russia started with the theory of internationalism. “Love of country” were words of contempt with them. And yet, because all human activity is summed up in a love of country in connection with a civitas, a whole, a universal, one finds in Russia the most intense realization of the conception of the State in the world and the most profound patriotism anywhere in existence. There is a pride in Russia, a sense of the wholeness of which they are a part in Russia; and that is extended to every Russian everywhere in the world. Only the other day an old Russian general wholly out of touch and out of sympathy with the Russian revolutionists said he was proud of being a Russian because in Russia these men had done something: they had made Russia full of activity and work and he wanted to go back and forget that he didn’t agree with them.

Of course you understand that when I speak of love of country I am not thinking — quite the reverse — of that narrow empirical concept which is called nationalism, an abstraction which leads to separateness from everything else, and finally to hate for every rival abstraction.

Love of country is the symbol of a eonncction with a whole; and a real connection with the whole will, conversely, follow it. This love of country, I say, is always a symptom of a high activity, a keen satisfaction with the daily task, because everyone feels that the task belongs somewhere. Wherever people lack this love of country they are tired, restless, life has no meaning. And so you find that an individual who lacks this love can’t find a place for himself in the universe. Aristotle centuries ago spoke of the man without a country as the homeless man, the spiritually homeless man, as too low for men. To live unto himself, Aristotle said, a man must be either a brute or a god. And so I say the individual who hasn’t this sense loses something of the sense of a universal, and when any group of people miss it their conduct must always be distorted. This sense of relation to a civitas is the warp and woof of politics. It works with economic means, moral means, intellectual means. And we can’t understand its real meaning if, as so many people do today, we make economics alone supreme.

Now the fact is the economic problem, the problem that deals with the production and distribution of wealth, is a problem that is always part of the political problem, but only a part, for whatever your economic program is, the question always arises: Who shall govern and carry out that economic program? Who shall use it for political purposes? And there again there is no country in the world that is a better example of what I am talking about than Russia. All the world speaks as if Russia were carrying on a great economic experiment. Nothing of the sort! Russia is carrying on one of the greatest political experiments in the world. Those who know more of the actual empirical science of economics than I know have said to me that there is nothing novel in the economic experiment of Russia — certainly its American technology, American rationalization, the Taylor system, are not — except for one thing, and that is the State furnishes the capital instead of the individual. And yet, obviously, that is not economic control at all; that is a political experiment. The State is politically intervening in the use of economic material. But without the political power of the State the economic experiment would be impossible.

So that it is conceivable that other countries may take over the economic system of Russia without touching the political system, or the political system without touching the economic system. It is possible to take over Russia’s political experiment without adopting its economic program, and conversely — although I doubt whether it is possible to put such an economic program through without the armed power of the State, which is political.

Therefore we have this political problem always about us, and those who carry it on are politicians and statesmen, and I think we must realize that the gift to govern is an art quite as completely as the ability to write poetry or to think philosophy. All of us think occasionally when we have to, and yet are not philosophers. All of us read imaginative literature even if we are not poets. And any of us can make a try at politics. But what I am implying is that the political gift is a spiritual gift quite as distinct as the poetic gift or philosophical gift or any other gift, and is to be respected as such. It has its own validity, its own laws. The useful has a spiritual reality quite as much as the good, the true, or the beautiful.

When the politician governs men, which is the hardest job known to humanity — the hardest and the noblest — when the politician governs men he is to be judged first and foremost by his success in governing men, just as in the case of a bridge you want to know whether it is a good bridge according to the standards of engineering and not whether it is a moral bridge. The first test of the politician is whether he governs well, not whether he governs morally. That is a later question. Unfortunately those who sit on the sidelines and don’t realize the innate character of government are always terribly troubled by the rottenness that goes on in politics. And I don’t mean to imply that there are not times when that rottenness should be our main concern. But what I mean is that always the man outside of politics sees it as a matter of rottenness and evil and people tricking and scheming. He confuses the weakness of the statesman’s materials with the corruption of government itself. And so the man who hasn’t a philosophical view of life will take a life like Lincoln’s and just rip it to pieces, as if the art of governing men were the work of a saint.

Now the politician doesn’t feel that sense that all is rotten in politics. He feels that the evil and good in the world are the very material with which he has to deal. He feels like the poet. The real poet, the great poet, doesn’t say, “My heavens, look at all this hard prosy material I have to conquer and transfigure!” The outsider who hasn’t the poet’s creative flow thinks that. — How can you ever make a poem out of this story? It is impossible; there is too much in it. — Or another one says: This is the machine age! How can we make poetry out of machines? — The poet doesn’t bother about those questions.

So the statesman, the politician, isn’t worried as mere outsiders are worried by the clash of passions and the fact that some men are not to be trusted and the fact that others will stab you in the back. That is all part of the game of politics. That is the material with which the statesman works, human nature and its passions. In exactly the same way that the poet deals with the stubborn material of the world and makes out of it a poem, so the politician makes his poem, which is in the government of the State. And it is a noble poem.

2

Now it is the great bane of our literature, of all literature in the last few years, that it has not had a sense of this political reality.

Of course you will realize that I am far from saying that every poet should take political material, that he should write political novels and political poems. In the first place, I don’t believe that anyone can predetermine the subjects of poetry. What I mean is that behind the literature that has been produced there is not this sense of direct contact with the practical, and through that with the whole of life. Our thought and feeling do not connect through politics with the sense of that universal which is imbedded in the love of country.

The Romantic poets lost this political sense. That probably explains why they all fled from their country, whether they were Byron and Shelley or whether they were Bret Harte and Henry James. They are the mirrors, I mean the types, of our homelessness, which follows the loss of the political sense, the loss of a country. And most of the shallow philosophies of our day — mysticism, moralism, aestheticism — have their weakness in exactly this same sense of lack of contact with the practical.

The poets have lost touch with man’s noblest practical work — the art of governing men. They no longer celebrate heroes, when as a matter of fact the whole purpose of poetry, almost, is to celebrate heroes. Unwillingness to celebrate the hero means that poetry has lost something of that manliness, or that conception of manliness, which is essential to every poet. I don’t mean to imply that the great poet has to be a bold man, a politician, a soldier; he may be even a coward. But if he hasn’t an admiration for manliness, if he doesn’t realize the dignity of courage wherever it is found, he is a flaccid poet. The great, poets of the world have invariably had this sense of the dignity of courage. But though poets don’t have to live politics, it is really surprising how many of them have done so in their lives, not merely in their imaginations.

Sophocles was an Athenian general. Dante was an active municipal official in Florence, and was exiled in a great battle which was the result of a tremendous political conflict. Milton served as Latin Secretary to Cromwell. Goethe was Prime Minister of Weimar, More poets than you suspect have been politicians or have served politicians as soldiers. But the important thing, after all, is what the poets have done with this political material in their imagination, not in their lives. And if you look at the great poetry of the world from Homer down you will find this keen political sense underlying it. Homer’s Iliad is the struggle of two great nations, representing two ideals, in mortal conflict for the government of the world. Virgil’s Aeneid, as you know, is a great political poem, a poem describing the founding of the Roman Empire and showing as a great poet would the wonderful quality of greatness and at the same time the sadness, the tragedy, the tears that greatness brings with it. That is a truly profound thought because it is so typical of the man of action. The man of action never can become a poet or a philosopher. But when he is tired of the struggle, worn out by this incessant struggle of reality, he looks longingly at the poet and the philosopher and the artist and says, '‘Oh, I think I will give up this struggle and go over to him and do what he is doing.” And you know, of course, he is not going to. And so Virgil’s sense of the sadness that haunts great achievement has a tremendous psychological insight not only into the history of man, but into the very psychology of the man of action who created Rome.

I don’t need to point out how the Divine Comedy is a great political poem —so much so that when Italy, many centuries later, conquered its freedom and became a nation, the thing that stimulated the Italians was the idea of nationality, of freedom in a united Italy, of a homeland, which they found in the poetry of Dante. If I had time, I would take Shakespeare, not merely the historical plays, but Lear and Hamlet, and show that they were fundamentally concerned with political matters, or with human affairs always in connection with political matters.

Thirty years ago Croce called all poetry lyrical intuition. All poetry had to be lyrical. He was writing at the time when the realists were in vogue. And so “lyrical intuition” was the historic phrase that represented his idea. If he were writing that book now I have no doubt he would emphasize the epic quality of all poetry, even of the shortest lyric, to indicate that it was not merely the trifling thoughts of the single man as he thought them from hour to hour, but that in every poetic moment the poet is driven to a kind of epic canvas of what is happening to all humanity, through the operation of the universal in him. Even today, when one is stirred by a poem like John Brown s Body, despite its banality, it is because again one feels some of the political element, something real, something universal, which goes beyond mere psychological nuance.

Politics alone, as I said before, will not make poetry. The political novels of Disraeli and Wells show that only too well. But the political sense must be recaptured: the sense of a civitas, of a whole, must be embodied in poetry. We must arrive at some fundamental faith that will give us again the zeal for great practical achievement; we must acquire the sense that the daily task is a part of the mission of the universe, as men have always felt when they have had a profound faith. The man who deeply loves his country begins with work, play, the daily task, the family; but eventually he embraces a higher country, which is the world. How can you believe that the ideal which you hold for your country is the finest in the world without wanting it for other countries? The United States at the moment of its greatest patriotism planned an America which, as the humorists said, should go as far as the North Pole and as far as the South Pole and up to the Aurora Borealis! It doesn’t make any difference where you start, you always end in one place, and that is the power that comes from some deep and active connection with the universal. This is the tie that binds the political moment to the poetic moment; it is what makes poetry and politics two of the noblest occupations of men.