Democracy and Poetry

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/democracypoetryOOgummrich ôn^tatsttm mntitttsive THE N. W. HARRIS LECTURES FOR 1911 were founded in 1906 through the generosity of Mr. Norman Wait Harris of Chicago, and are to be given annually. The purpose of the lecture foundation is, as expressed by the donor, "to stimulate scientific research of the highest type and to bring the results of such research before the students and friends of Northwestern University, and through them to the world. By the term 'scientific research 'is meant scholarly investigation into any department of human thought or effort without limitation to research in the so-called natural sciences, but with a desire that such investigation should be extended to cover the whole field of human knowledge," DEMOCRACY AND POETRY BY FRANCIS B. GUMMERE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 191 1, BY FRANCIS B. GUMMERE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published October igij yd. PREFACE Tffls particular sketch of the relations between democracy and poetry opens with a retrospect- ive view of the institution, and closes with a sort of prophecy about the art. In neither case is there the slightest pretence to completeness. Books and essays on democracy and the reaction abound ; it may be doubted, however, that they will bring any surprises, so far as princi- ples of government are concerned, to one who has read the proceedings of the various state conventions, notably in the case of Virginia, which decided upon the Constitution. Books and essays, again, abound on the state and the progress of poetry ; but no practical crisis in poetic affairs has brought the discussion to a crucial point. The very unpretending forecast which ends these lectures undertakes neither an inventory — the books of the na- tions lie open to every inquirer — nor yet the intensive problem, such as that question lately 4 o b u - vi PREFACE put forth by "an ingenious writer" in regard to the likeHhood that artistic and delicately adjusted relations of a group of words in prose shall be substituted for the melody and the metaphor once achieved in the now exhausted individual word of verse. Only a general con- clusion, for English poetry alone, has been essayed. F. B. G. 3 September, 1911. CONTENTS I. DEMOCRACY 1 II. REACTION 47 III. WHITMAN AND TAINE 96 IV. THE FUNCTIONAL ORIGINS OF POETRY 149 V. DEMOCRACY IN POETRY 210 VI. ALMA POESIS 268 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY I DEMOCRACY The most prominent phase of recent history is the long movement inspired by democratic ideals. The most obvious feature of our modern life is a reaction, in thought at least, against that movement and a tendency to- wards unbelief in those ideals. Movement and reaction alike form a constant theme for essay- ists, historians, observers of social and political conditions, students of literature, even, and of the arts ; and about the main fact all these writers are at one. For two centuries, however sundered by fortune and narrower drifts of opinion the thinkers and the dreamers of the world might seem to themselves, they were for the most part dreaming and thinking in the common terms of democracy. Looking at them in fair perspective, one sees now that in ; ^'. : ':i \]\X^tÔCÂCY and poetry spite of much jeering and quarrelling bact and forth in the ranks, they all kept step and that is the democratic virtue. They were neither outright optimists nor outright pes- simists; on their banner was inscribed "All for the best in the worst of worlds " ; and that is the democratic motto. They delighted in announcing new ideas, which are now so shop-worn that even doctor-dissertations will not heed them, but which then seemed to be Columbian discoveries. It was a timid and incipient democrat in literary criticism who began to break down the walls of national literature and to treat poetry as a making of the citizen of the world. This was Morhof in Ger- many about 1682. It was another democrat in literary criticism who first suggested that the nodding and napping of Homer might be stretched into the sleep of non-existence, and that what men took to be a poet was the Greek people itself — not themselves, but itself — chanting its own deeds. This was Vico, the Italian, about 1700.^ It was the democrat * Vico's book was published in 1725 ; but his ideas made DEMOCRACY 3 of a somewhat later date who took charge of history, and kept throwing about that same notion of the people itself — not themselves — with a fine sense of innovation. It was a democrat in philosophy, in ethics, in religion, who put fresh life into the word " humanity," and once more lifted hands of benediction over the outcasts of the earth. If one should ask for a focus, so to speak, upon the clash of old and new in this particular, there is nothing better than the scene suggested by a letter of Horace Walpole telling how in 1766 he heard Wesley preach at Bath. To the rising democratic sentiment of the day that great man, who knew so well how to revive the old com- munal sentiment, the vitality of religion in the social group, was preaching the acceptable year of the Lord, liberty to the captive, and the opening of the prison to them that were bound. But to the aristocrat's mind, Wesley little headway at first. It is interesting, by the way, to note Fielding, Journey from this World to the Next^ chap, viii, asking Homer " whether he had really writ that poem in detached pieces, and sung it about as ballads all over Greece." 4 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY " exalted his voice, and acted very ugly enthusiasm" Indeed, the history of this word "enthusiasm," for some fifty years, tells the progress of democracy. It was not only satir- ists like Swift, in his Mechanical Operation of the Sjmnt, who had hated this "fanatic " strain or tincture of enthusiasm ; all serious, balanced men disavowed it as a vice. " I was resolved," says Hume in 1738 about some pruning he had done upon his Treatise, " I was resolved not to be an enthusiast in philosophy while I was blaming other enthusi- asms"; and Shaftesbury had recommended "good humour " as "the best security against enthusiasm," — as if this were an infectious disease. Every democrat is an enthusiast, and so is every young poet ; but in those days both poetry and democracy, though the tide was turning, were at a low ebb. Enthusiasm, then as much as to say fanaticism and rant, the vice of vices to the mind of a good tory in religion and letters, became in a few de- cades the note of humanity and the sign of men who were really alive. Even Voltaire is DEMOCRACY 5 an enthusiast, little as one is inclined to think of him as enlisted in the same ranks with Wesley; and the cold, stately, conservative Goethe must nevertheless be remembered as one who wrote to his old drawing-master words which ought to be carved on the portals of every school and college in the world: "Teaching does much, but enthusiasm does all," — Lehre thut viel, aber Aufmunterung thut Alles, Thus from academic and professional quar- ters came, as all men know, the ideas which inspired the democratic movement in politics, and here again dreaming and thinking had to suffice several generations ; for faith in democracy was fixed long before its practice was assured. Distrust of democracy, on the other hand, and unbelief in its mission, are growing more and more bold at a time when its political and social practice has triumphed far beyond the hopes cherished by those pious founders of two hundred years ago. Its phys- ical success is huge, and its credit never stood so high ; but faith, despite the youth- 6 DEMOCRACY AND POETRY ful Heine a very different matter, faith in the power of democracy to realize its own ideals, is waning ; and, as in the former case, as in every process of the sort in human affairs, one finds the leaders of the reactionary movement among the children of light. They had been wont to live in monarchy and think in democracy ; now the formula is reversed. Poets are apt to be very sensitive to such changes of thought, and have always held a kind of ce- lestial commission to protest against the abuse of power, whether, in Sidney's fine phrase, they make "kings fear to be tyrants," or whether, as now, they cry out upon the ty- ranny of the mob. By this is not meant the use of poetry, however effective, in mere political function, like Dryden's satire, or the verse of the Anti-Jacobin, but the voice of poetry speaking from its high places and as an ora- cle. In the specific case we find poets voicing the earlier reaction which came close upon the days of The Terror, and also we find them beginning and leading the chorus of protest that sounds with such persistence and such DEMOCRACY 7 volume to-day. It was the " fervent entreaty of friends," and not his own judgment, which forced Lowell to blot from one of his serious poems a line which spoke of America as " the " land of broken promise ; while his sarcastic verses on the world's fair of 1876, actually printed in the Nation, called out an indignant cartoon from Nast, which in its turn was sup- pressed by " the fervent entreaty of friends." Emerson, too, always hopeful, always serene in his outlook, who gave democracy that opu- lent and audacious phrase, " God said, ^ I am tired of Kings,* " nevertheless put into a single epigram the bitterest slur ever made upon this republic and her rule.

Load more