The Literature of Ecstasy Part 17

Pater in his _Renaissance_ took the position that poetry has a personal message for us, an effect on us individually. We cannot learn this effect by following metaphysical discourses on the relation of beauty to truth or experience. In his _Appreciations_ in the essay on "Style"

Pater identifies beauty with expression, just as Croce did after him, and Lessing and Winckelmann before him. "All beauty," wrote Pater, "is in the long run only _fullness_ of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within." Here we have Croce's conception of beauty, the word defined as it is being understood to-day. It is in this sense only, the sense of the most adequate expression of emotion, that the word beauty is the same as poetry, or literature of ecstasy.

Formerly treatises were written about curved lines, elegant diction, etc., on the theory that beauty was the subject of art. But a peasant's description in slang of his emotions, an author's description of a corpse that is rotting, or of a woman giving birth to a child, or of a man going mad, or of a hideous degenerate crime, are also beautiful, for since expression is beauty, the narration or description of the ugly is a work of art. The word beauty in its popular sense no longer has aesthetic significance. Even when it was really believed that art dealt with beautiful objects and deeds, the aesthetician had to admit that there was nothing beautiful in tragedies. Nor does beauty mean elegant expression. Many stories and poems in slang and dialect belong to the literature of beauty. The expression of emotions, the delineation of ideas, the drawing of characters is beauty, if effectively done. The reader need not have what the old aestheticians called "taste"; he must only respond sympathetically to the ecstasy of the author.

I have made no attempt to set confines to poetry, for no two people will ever agree as to whether a literary performance has sufficient ecstasy or whether the ecstasy is of a high strain to ent.i.tle it to be called poetry, but I believe all will agree that ecstasy is necessary.

I believe, however, that many authoritative works and essays on Poetry, from Aristotle to our own day, are obsolete. I shall mention only Watts-Dunton's article on Poetry in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ which has furnished modern critics with many of their ideas. The article is beyond question one of the most interesting produced in England in many years. Watts-Dunton has a true conception of poetry when he calls it the product of inspiration or concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional language. He believes, however, versification is necessary to all poetry. He also makes too much of the divisions of poetry into the various orders, like epic, lyric, drama, an artificial division adopted by all critics from Aristotle. Watts-Dunton's divisions of poets into those with an absolute or personal vision and those with a relative vision, is arbitrary and confused. All poets are personal, and even when they depict other people's emotions objectively, the product is personal because touched with the creator's personality. He is also too much under the influence of Hegel's _Aesthetics_.

Watts-Dunton could not understand the value of impa.s.sioned prose or its right to be called poetry. He once said to William Michael Rossetti that the latter's reputation as a critic would soon vanish because of his admiration for Whitman, whom he himself detested. He is blamed with having done much to quench the poetic fire of Swinburne's muse, for whose changed att.i.tude towards Whitman he also was responsible. He had no sympathy with the poetry that had a social message and he did not understand its effect as a catharsis. Watts-Dunton cannot remain our leading authority on poetry. His essay belongs to the extinct cla.s.s of _Ars Poetica_, with Boileau and Opitz.

Ecstasy is then the substance of poetry, and there are all kinds of ecstasy, from a very exalted to a primitive order. It includes the scientist's or philosopher's pa.s.sion for knowledge, the idealist's devotion to a cause. It comprehends the warrior's madness for battle, the patriot's ardor to die for his country, and man's submission to his G.o.d. Ecstasy holds in its sway the man who is moved by reading a great work of art. It sweeps every one who is in the throes of ambition. Those who enjoy nature, athletics, and games are in the throes of ecstasy.

Those who are bemoaning the death of one they love, or rejoicing in the emergence of dear ones from illness or danger, those who take pride in watching their children grow up, those who exult in the pleasure of friendship, are all in ecstasy.

Every one who builds dreams and sees visions of better things, every one who fulminates against ugliness and wrong, is possessed by ecstasy. Are you in a state of rapture because your love is returned, or in one of despair, because it is denied?--you are in ecstasy. Are you brooding over a sense of wrong or injustice, are you moved by the spectacle of grief?--you are in ecstasy. Ecstasy is intoxication, in a good and in a bad sense. The origin of the drinking-song was due to the pleasant emotions and dreams which the indulgence in alcohol aroused.

The mystic who thinks he is in personal communion with G.o.d, the lunatic who thinks demons are prodding him, the spiritualist who imagines he talks to his dead son, the child who is in communication with animals and supernatural creatures, are all victims of some form of ecstasy.

It is the great poet who knows which is a high order of ecstasy to choose, what att.i.tude to take towards it and in what words and form to convey it.

The people do like poetry and read it, but are unaware of the fact. For the great bulk of the poetry read by the people is the prose fiction that they find exciting and stimulating. This fiction is usually of a very low order. Nevertheless good poetry is to be found in the simple and emotional prose of the world, in the dramatic situations in novels, in the best pa.s.sages of short stories. Prose poetry is the most democratic and natural poetry, at least in form, and you can rely on the public to appreciate some of it.

The poetry in d.i.c.kens is democratic poetry. The drawing of such characters as the elder Pegotty and Joe Gargery, wherein he shows the n.o.ble virtues residing in common people, is poetry that the public can appreciate.

Poetry cannot, however, always be democratic, for when it deals with ideas beyond the people, such as you find in Nietzsche and Ibsen, it does not succeed in evoking the intended response and sympathy from the public, which rejects such ideas.

So when we hear people say that they do not care for poetry we see that they mean they have an aversion to verse in metre or rhyme or rhythm.

But they will weep as they read of the death of Little Nell and be moved by the sorrows of Anna Karenina, and be stirred by the tragedy of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. Like the gentleman in Moliere's play who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, these readers are fond of poetry without being aware of the fact. Every lover of good literature appreciates poetry though he reads no verse. He is touched by the ecstasy which tinctures all emotional or beautiful prose literature.

Here the poetic is divested of metaphors and rhythm and trappings and verbal tricks; here it is not hidden by obscurity or spoiled by affectation.

You love poetry if you are touched by the lines in Burke's _Letter to a n.o.ble Lord_, where the great orator, desolate because of the loss of his son and embittered by criticism for accepting a pension, bares the state of his soul.

The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered upon me. I am stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth. . . . I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive myself if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world. . . .

I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors.

You are hearing Heine the poet when he describes in his _Confessions_ his feelings as he lay on his mattress grave, no less than when you peruse his love woes in verse.

What does it avail me that at banquets my health is pledged in the choicest wines and drunk from golden goblets, when I, myself, severed from all that makes life pleasant may only wet my lips with an insipid emotion? What does it avail me that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel wreaths, if meanwhile the shriveled fingers of an aged nurse press a blister of Spanish flies behind the ears of my actual body. What does it avail me that all the roses of Shiraz so tenderly glow and bloom for me? Alas! Shiraz is two thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where, in the dreary solitude of my sick-room, I have nothing to smell, unless it be the perfume of warmed napkins.

When you read Hardy's _Return of the Native_ and reach the part where Yeobright reproaches his wife Eustacia for causing the death of his mother by closing the door on her so as not to be detected with a lover, you are in the midst of poetry.

Call her to mind--think of her--what goodness there was in her: it showed in every line of her face! . . . O! couldn't you see what was best for you, but you must bring a curse upon me, and agony and death upon her, by doing that cruel deed!

. . . Eustacia, didn't any tender thought of your own mother lead you to think of being gentle to mine at such a time of weariness? Did not one grain of pity _enter_ your heart as she turned away?

If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of the following pa.s.sage from Lafcadio Hearn's "Of Moon-Desire," from the volume _Exotics and Retrospectives_, you delight in poetry.

And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage nature that spring from the deepest sources of our being . . . would seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.

Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings? Have you never, when looking at some great burning, found yourself exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of fire?--never unconsciously coveted the crumbling, splitting, iron-wrenching, granite-cracking force of its imponderable touch?--never delighted in the furious and terrible splendor of its phantasmagories,--the ravening and bickering of its dragons,--the monstrosity of its archings,--the ghostly soaring and flapping of its spires? Have you never, with a hill-wind pealing in your ears, longed to ride that wind like a ghost,--to scream around the peaks with it,--to sweep the face of the world with it? Or, watching the lifting, the gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers, have you felt no impulse kindered to the giant motion,--no longing to leap with that wild tossing, and to join in that mighty shout?

I should like to go on quoting pa.s.sages from other books to show the reader that if he likes them he is emphatically a lover of poetry. I might have given one of the great prose poems in Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ or a grand descriptive pa.s.sage from Flaubert's novel _Salammbo_. I might have presented for the edification of the "hater" of poetry the renowned description of the Mona Lisa by Pater in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci in _The Renaissance_. I could have added Carlyle's reflections of Teufelsdroch in his tower, from _Sartor Resartus_, Heine's portrayal of Paginini at the violin in _The Florentine Nights_, George Brandes's apostrophe to Hamlet as a symbol of ourselves in his book on _Shakespeare_, d.i.c.kens' description of the tower in _Chimes_, or Balzac's eulogy on the scientist as a poet in the _Wild a.s.s's Skin_.

That is poetry whether in verse or prose, where any profound idea is ecstatically or pa.s.sionately stated. That is poetry where man gives utterance to any sorrow or desolation, or where he shouts out his gladness because he finds life good and nature beautiful; when he talks of the pains or thrills of love; when he shows compa.s.sion for the miseries of his fellow-men. You find poetry wherever man is depicted in a spirit of self-sacrifice for an idea or a person he loves; or where he is shown pursuing an ideal or ambition. Heroism is poetry; philanthropy is poetry; self-development is poetry. Pictures of striking scenes; portrayals of interesting events; conflicts between duties; delineations of tragic situations; tolerance for human frailties; anger at injustice, admonition for follies, chidings or outbursts against stupidity; cries of helplessness; all of these in artistic form become poems. Accounts of cruelty, barbarism, madness, horror, wicked deeds or abnormal or supernormal conduct, if well described become poetical, for poetry need not point a conventional moral. Hence villainy, immorality, crime, may be so artistically pictured that our emotions are worked upon and though our moral sense is shocked we are held spellbound in witnessing these malign forces in nature.

I plead then that ecstasy, and not rhythm, should characterize much of our literature; and I seek to show that poetry is not a department of literature but a spirit that permeates the best writing even in prose.

Our entire att.i.tude in estimating what is poetry will be changed, for the world's emotional prose literature will be taken into its domain.

And the importance of rhythm in making verse will be a thing of the past and genuine emotion will receive its right name.

I also hope that a higher valuation will be given to literature which shows an interest in the working cla.s.ses and seeks social justice. I do not, however, a.s.sert that the literature of pure rational propaganda would become poetry, or that the writings of men who attach themselves to certain political or economical theories would be great by virtue of the adherence to a particular theory. But there is a tendency to decry a writer when he shows an interest in social problems and tells the world that something is rotten in Denmark.

There are occasionally great literary products that are to be found often in radical and obscure papers that belong to the literature of the ecstasy of social justice. These would have never been accepted by the academic or capitalistic bourgeois press, any more than would some of the older prophecies have been accepted had they been submitted as unrequested contributions to our magazine editors. Many of those compositions depend for literary value on universal feeling, and make no appeal to party feeling or economical theory, and they can be appreciated by people who seek poetry.

The reader will observe then that not all species of ecstasy belong to the high order of literature. But the skill of the artist may elevate the lower order of ecstasy to that of a higher plane, and the amateurishness of the author may deflect what might be poetry of a higher degree to that of a commonplace order. Stories of adventure, abounding in false sentiment, misleading examples and unreal situations, are hardly poetry or good literature of ecstasy. But Stevenson trans.m.u.tes such a tale into excellent poetry in _Treasure Island_. Those who have read the pathological outbursts of religio-maniacs, rife in outworn dogma, and seething with morbid emotions, will not maintain that such productions are poetry of a high order, though the ecstatic element is present in marked degree. Yet a St. Augustine occasionally makes good poetry out of such material.

In general, that is not great poetry or literature of ecstasy which appeals to the rude primitive emotions. When the purpose of a literary work is to wean us from finer feelings, to make us sympathize with cruelty, to paralyze the sympathetic emotions within us, and to kill all feelings rooted in love, pity, service, justice and kindness, it is not of a great order of poetry. Those works in whole or part that fan the martial spirit within us, and take hold of us as with an hypnotic sway of the hand, and make us seek to murder our fellow men, and to arouse the l.u.s.t for blood in us, cannot be great works. No literature that is heartless or brutal, or confuses an appeal to the murderous instincts with real love of country, or love of liberty, with self-sacrifice for justice or loved ones, can be valuable to us either practically or aesthetically. No literature that reeks with blood, and fosters unreasonable revenge, or depicts sympathetically shameful victories, or crowns with the garland of a hero the mere warrior who is a warrior for the pure delight of killing, is really of the higher type of literature of ecstasy. It is this martial phase that makes most of the early literature of all nations valuable only in parts; in those parts where the more beautiful and human phases of life are dealt with, and where the more genial emotions are crystallized. So many theories of poetry are futile, because they are based on studies primarily of the epic poems of the nations, and it is these epic poems that mingle the most impoverished and base poetry with that of a fine quality.

Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a high order which is purely tribal or clannish in feeling; nor when chauvinistic and full of hatred for all other peoples. This does not mean that poetry must not smack of the soil, and that it cannot preserve a sane patriotic and national feeling, and worship a culture inherent in a people. But when the ecstasy descends to the kind which kills individualism under the pretense of encouraging it, when it is hostile to the stranger and the original thinker, when it fosters the primitive anti-social instincts as regards all outside of a clan, it becomes inhuman and pernicious.

Nor is that great poetry or literature of ecstasy of a high order which in its mystic quality eludes all compromises with reason, and borders on absurdity or is pathological. When poetry seeks salvation in apparent madness, and attaches itself to faith in the impossible, and sees distorted visions, and creates a maniac's world of unquestionably inverted order of h.e.l.l-fire and brimstone, and makes outrageous and unjust demands on human nature it is of a low order. Nor is an unwarranted asceticism in poetry calculated to raise its tone.

It is vain to enumerate the various ecstasies of a low order, that of the literature which upholds different forms of wrong, as well as that which is too much attached to the commonplace, nor is it necessary to show that that poetry is not of a high order whose author goes into ecstasies about nuances, indulges in inappropriate imagery, piles up trite ideas in flowery diction, or gives continual iteration to the least important of commonplace emotions.

What then is literature of a high order? What is this great form of art that takes us out of ourselves because it has in it so much of ourselves? What is this magical arrangement of words enshrining what ideas and emotions that gives us a zest for life, that makes us drunk with aesthetic pleasure? It includes many species, all, as Milton would say, in a "strain of a higher mood." One of its greatest manifestations is that in which the ecstasy for social justice and a high form of idealism control the poet. We become carried away with his frenzy, for it evokes the highest emotions in us; an undeviating and never swerving enthusiasm for spreading right and happiness is an elevated form of ecstasy. The grief of the oppressed and the poor goes to our own hearts, and the calamities of the woe-begone become our own. We submerge our personality in that of the human race, and the griefs of strangers lure us to cry out for them.

But it should be remembered that literature never thus becomes a weapon for reform or a piece of didacticism or propaganda. The emotion is the thing. The practical work of relief of suffering is the function of the reformer and not the poet. It is the poet's duty only to make a certain form of ecstasy contagious. Practical results will follow as a matter of course.

And then there is the ecstasy that revolves around a profound philosophic insight, when the poet rids himself of prejudiced and barren thinking and looks at the universe with awe and goes into rhapsodies about its workings. And it takes a high order of intellect to sympathize with the literature of ecstasy of this kind, that pierces into the soul of the universe. The advanced ideas of the greatest poets are, however, often such as only a few people have intellect enough to perceive, or are such as can be grasped only when man throws aside all his prejudices. And here the great philosopher, mathematician and scientist come to the aid of the poet, who emotionalizes their greatest discoveries. For reason must go hand in hand with ecstasy.

There is the ecstasy where men are shown in the helpless grasp of great pa.s.sions, and are in despair because of events beyond their control.

Such pa.s.sions include grief of all kinds, whether brought about by death or wrong or one's own folly. The depicting of great pa.s.sion belongs to the grand order of the literature of ecstasy even when the poet makes no attempt to moralize from or sympathize with it. Crime and wickedness may be masterfully described with no ethical intent, for we are interested in the grand spectacle of a man whom the G.o.ds have made mad, for madness is potential in all of us.

There is the ecstasy of the lover in his rapture for his mistress, and in his transformed nature. We are moved by the delicacy of his sentiment, his chivalry, his sacrifice, we are overcome by his sorrows and his misfortunes. There is the ecstasy of the love of nature where the majesty of this universe is set out in its glory. There is the ecstasy of the lover of beauty for its own sake, and of the artist in the pursuit of his work, and of the reader and of him who listens to music, of him who sees artistic pictures. There is the ecstasy of the scientist in his pursuit of truth, and of the inventor in transforming the face of the globe.

We cry out for ecstasy; it is the substance of our lives; even though, often in our pursuit of pleasant ecstasy, we are launched into tragedy.

We are hungry for a happy life of the emotions. It is this which makes lovers and friends and parents of us. It is this which makes us poets, and it is the poet in ourselves that we always hunt out.

I hope our study has helped us to distinguish the higher from the lower forms of ecstasy, to find poetry in prose, and to differentiate poetry from verse, wherein there is no ecstasy but various conventions, like inversion, poetic diction, rhyme, metre, figures of speech, parallelisms, technique, and all forms of rhythm and repeats. That much of the best of the world's poetry has made abundant use of these mechanisms has led the critics to confuse poetry with its conventions.

But the ecstasy was forgotten, and the emotional and intellectual value of the poem was overlooked. It was thought because the masters subscribed slavishly to the conventions that they became poets because of them, whereas they were poets first and last because of the ecstasy, sometimes with the aid of the conventions and sometimes despite them.

That these mechanisms will always be used in some degree is certain, but the most natural poetry will be that which uses them moderately, irregularly and only when the emotions and the ideas naturally clothe themselves in them.

Poetry and prose then are not contradictory, but prose becomes poetry when the element of ecstasy is present. We use the word prosaic in a sense, it is true, which means dest.i.tute of imagination or emotion; we even call verse of this kind prosaic. But a work in prose may be poetical, and one in verse be prosaic, and science, philosophy and morality become poetry, though in the form of prose, when bathed in the spirit of ecstasy. And the highest form of poetry is that wherein the ecstasy springs from our nature's most human and most admirable side.

After having learned that poetry is more natural without metre or a pattern, that it may be in prose with or without rhythm, that it may have a social message, that it is the product of the unconscious, that it is related to dreams in being an imaginary fulfilled wish of the poet, that it acts as a relief to the writer and the reader, that it is always personal and lyric, that it is synonymous with expression in the poet's mind, that its chief characteristic is pa.s.sion, imagination or ecstasy, that its qualities are often enhanced rather than destroyed by the presence of intellect or morality, that it is an emotional spirit holding literature in suffusion instead of being a branch of literature, we shall find that most of the old definitions of poetry exclude a great deal of the world's best poetry, and include much that is not poetry.