God’s in His heaven,
All’s right with the world.
Specimen of the second:
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
All poetry (forgetting, for the moment, its possible merit as mere sound) may be resolved into either the one or the other of these imbecilities—its essential character lies in its bold flouting of what every reflective adult knows to be the truth. The poet, imagining him to be sincere, is simply one who disposes of all the horrors of life on this earth, and of all the difficulties presented by his own inner weaknesses on less, by the elementary device of denying them. Is it a well-known fact that love is an emotion that in almost as perishable as eggs—that it is biologically impossible for a given male to yearn for given female more than a few brief years? Then the post disposes of it by assuring his girl that he will nevertheless love her forever—more, by pledging his word of honor that he believes that she will love him forever. Is it equally notorious that there is no such thing as justice in the world—that the good are tortured insanely and the evil go free and prosper? Then the post composes a piece crediting God with a mysterious and unintelligible system of jurisprudence, whereby the torture of the good is a sort of favor conferred upon them for their goodness. Is it of almost equally widespread report that no healthy man likes to contemplate his own inevitable death—that even in time of war, with a vast pumping up of emotion to conceal the fact, every, soldier hopes and believes that he, personally, will escape? Then the poet, first carefully introducing himself into bombproof, achieves strophes declaring that he is free from all such weakness—that he will deliberately seek a rendezvous with death, and laugh ha-ha when the bullet finds him.
The precise nature of the imbecility thus solemnly set forth depends, very largely, of course, upon, the private prejudices and yearnings of the poet, and the reception that is given it depends, by the same token, upon the private prejudices and yearnings of the reader. That is why it is often so difficult to get any agreement upon the merits of a definite poem, i.e., to get any agreement upon its capacity to soothe. There is the man who craves only the animal delights of a sort of Moslem-Methodist paradise: to him “The Frost is on the Pumpkin” is a noble poem. There is the man who yearns to get out of the visible universe altogether and trend the fields of asphodel: for him there is delight only on the mystical stuff of Crashaw, Donne, Thompson and company. There is the man who revolts against the sordid Christian notion of immortality—an eternity to be spent flapping wing with pious greengrocers and Anglican bishops; he finds his escape in the gorgeous blasphemies of Swinburne. There is, to make an end, the man who, with an inferiority complex eating out of his heart, is moved by a great desire to stalk the world in heroic guise: he may go to the sonorous swanking of Kipling, or he may go to something more subtle, to some poem in which the boasting is more artfully concealed, say Christina Rossetti’s “When I am Dead.” Many men, many complexes, many secret yearnings! They collect, of course, in groups; of the group happens to be large enough the poet it is devotes to becomes famous. Kipling’s fame is thus easily explained. He appealed to the commonest of all types of men next to the sentimental type—which is to say, he appealed to the bully and braggart type, the chestslapping type. the patriot type. Less harshly described, to the boy type. All of us have been Kiplingomaniacs at some time or other. I was myself a very ardent one at 17, and wrote many grandiloquent sets of verse in the manner of “Tommy Atkins” and “Fuzzy-Wuzzy.” But if the gifts of observation and reflection have been given to us, we get over it, There comes a time when we no longer yearn to be heroes, but seek only ease—maybe even hope for quick extinction. Then we turn to Swinburne and “The Garden of Proserpine” – more false assurances, more mellifluous play-acting, another tinkling make-believe—but how sweet on blue days!
One of the things to remember here (too often it is forgotten, and Prescott deserves favorable mention for stressing it) is that a man’s conscious desires are not always identical with his subconscious longings; in fact, the two are often directly antithetical. The real man lies in the depths of the subconscious, like a carp lurking in mud. His conscious personality is largely a product of his environment—the reaction of his subconscious to the prevailing notions of what ïs meet and seemly. Here, of course, I wander into platitude, for the news that all men are frauds was already stale in the days of Hammurabi. Freud simply translated the fact into pathological terms, added a bedroom scene, and so laid the foundations for his psychoanalysis. He made a curious mistake when he brought sex into the fore ground of his new magic. He was, of course, quite right when he argued that, in civilized societies, sex impulses were more apt to be suppressed than any other natural impulses, and that the subconscious thus tends to be crowded with their ghosts. But in considering sex impulses, he forgot sex imaginings. Digging out, by painful cross-examination in a darkened room, some starling tale of carnality in his patient’s past, he committed the incredible folly of assuming it to be literally true. More often than not, I believe, it was a mere piece of boasting, a materialization of desire—in brief, a poem. He should have psychoanalyzed a few poets instead of wasting all his time upon psychopathic women with sclerotic husbands. He would have dredged amazing things out of their subconsciouses, heroic as well as amorous. Imagine the billions of Boers, Germans, Irishmen and Hindus that Kipling would have confessed to killing!
A man’s preferences in poetry constitute an excellent means of estimating his inner cravings and credulities. The music disarms his critical sense, and he confesses to cherishing ideas that he would repudiate with indignation of they were put into plain words. I say he cherishes those ideas. Maybe he simply tolerates them unwillingly; maybe they are no more than inescapable heritage from his barbarous ancestors, like his vermiform appendix. Think of the poems you like, and you will come upon many such intellectual fossils—ideas that you by no means subscribe to openly, but that nevertheless give you a strange joy. I put myself on the block as Exhibit A: there is my delight in Lizette Woodworth Reese’s sonnet, “Tears.” Nothing could do more violence to my conscious beliefs. put into prose, the doctrine in the poem would make me laugh. There is no man in Christendom who is less a Christina than I am. But here the dead hand grabs me by the ear. My barbarian ancestors were converted to Christianity in the year 1535, and remained of that faith until near the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Observe, now, the load I carry; more than three hundred years of Christianity, and perhaps a thousand years (maybe even two, or three thousand) of worship of heathen gods before that—at the least, thirteen hundred years of uninterrupted belief in the immortality of the soul. Is it any wonder that, betrayed by the music of Miss Reese’s Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, my conscious faith is lulled to sleep, thus giving my subconscious a chance to wallow in its immemorial superstition?
There are days when every one of us experiences this ontogenetic back-firing, and returns to an earlier stage of development. It is on such days that grown men play games, or cheer the flag, or fall in love. And it is then that they are in the mood for poetry, and get comfort out of its asseverations of the obviously not true. A truly civilized man, when he is wholly himself, derives no pleasure from hearing a poet state, as Browning stated, that all is well with the world. Such tosh not only does not please him; it definitely offends him, as he is offended by an idiotic article in a newspaper; it roils him to encounter so much stupidity in Christendom. But he may like it when he is drunk, or suffering from some low toxemia, or staggering beneath some great disaster. Then, as I say, the ontogenetic process reverses itself, and he slides back into infancy. Then he goes to poets, just as he goes to women and to theology. The very highest orders of men, perhaps, never suffer from such malaises of the spirit, or, if they suffer from them, never succumb to them. Charles Darwin was such a man. There was never a moment in his life when he sought religious consolation, and there was never a moment when he turned to poetry; in fact, he regarded it as silly.
Other first-rate men, more sensitive to the possible music in it, regard it with less positive aversion, but I have never heard of a truly first-rate man who got any permanent satisfaction out of its content. The Browning Societies of the latter part of the Nineteenth Century (and I choose the Browning Societies because Browning’s poetry was often more or less logical in content, and thus above the ordinary intellectually) were not composed of such men as Huxley, Spencer, Lecky, Buckle and Trevelyan, but of third-rate schoolmasters, moony old maids, candidates for theosophy, literary vicars, and other such Philistines. The chief propagandist for Browning in the United States was not Henry Adams, or William Summer, but an obscure professor of English who was also an ardent spook-chaser. And what is thus true ontogenetically is also true phylogenetically. That is to say, poetry is chiefly produced and esteemed by peoples that have not yet come to maturity. The Romans had a dozen poets of the first talent before they had a single prose writer of any skill whatsoever. So did the English.
In its character as a sort of music poetry is plainly a good deal more respectable, and makes an appeal to a far higher variety of reader, or, at all events, to a reader in a stage of greater mental clarity. A capacity for music—by which I mean melody, harmony and clang-tint—comes late in the history of every race. The savage can apprehend rhythm, but he is quite incapable of carrying a tune in any intelligible scale. The Negroes of our own South, who are commonly regarded as very musical, are actually only rhythmical; they never invent melodies, but only rhythms. And the whites to whom their barbarous dance-tunes chiefly appeal are in their own stage of culture. When one observes a room full of well-dressed men and women swaying and wriggling to the tune of some villainous mazurka from the Mississippi levees, one may assume very soundly that they are all the sort of folk who play golf and bridge. A great deal of superficial culture is compatible with that pathetic barbarism, and even a high degree of esthetic sophistication in other directions. The Greeks who built the Parthenon knew no more about music than a hog knows of predestination; they were almost as ignorant in that department as the modern Iowans or New Yorkers. It was not, indeed, until the Renaissance that music as we know it appeared in the world, and it was not until less than two centuries ago that it reached a high development. In Shakespeare’s day music was just getting upon its legs in England; in Goethe’s day it was just coming to full flower in Germany; in France and America it is still in the savage state. It is thus the youngest of the arts, and the most difficult, and hence the noblest. Any sane young man of twentytwo can write an acceptable sonnet, or draw a horse that will not be mistaken for an automobile, but before he may write even a bad string quartet he must go through a long and arduous training, just as he must strive for years before he may write prose that is instantly recognizable as prose, and not as a string of mere words.
The virtue of such great poets as Shakespeare does not lie in the content of their poetry, but in its music. The content of the Shakespearean plays, in fact, is often puerile, and sometimes quite incomprehensible. No scornful essays by George Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris were needed to demonstrate the fact; it lies plain in the text. One snickers sourly over the spectacle of generations of pedants debating the question of Hamlet’s mental processes; the simple fact is that Shakespeare gave him no more mental processes than a Fifth avenue rector has, but merely employed him as a convenient spout for some of the finest music ever got into words. As it is intoned on the stage by actors, it commonly loses content altogether. One cannot make out what the poor ham is saying; one can only observe that it is beautiful. There are whole speeches in the Shakespearean plays whose meaning is unknown even to scholars—and yet they remain favorites, and well deserve to. Who knows, again, what the sonnets are about? Is the bard talking about the inn-keeper’s wife at Oxford, or about a love affair of a pathological character? Some say one thing, and some another. But all who have ears must agree that the sonnets are extremely beautiful stuff—that the English language reaches in them the topmost heights of conceivable beauty. Shakespeare thus ought to be ranked among the musicians, along with Beethoven. As a philosopher he was a ninth-rater—but so was Ludwig. I wonder what he would have done with prose. I can’t make up my mind about it. One day I believe that he would have written it as well as Dryden and the next day I begin to fear that he would have produced something as bad as Swinburne. He had the ear, but he lacked the logical sense. Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
At the extremes there are indubitable poetry and incurable prose, and the difference is not hard to distinguish. Prose is simply a form of writing in which the author intends that his statements shall be accepted as conceivably true, even when they are about imaginary persons and events; its appeal is to the fully conscious and alertly reasoning man. Poetry is a form of writing in which the author attempts to disarm reason and evoke emotion, partly by presenting images that awaken a powerful response in the subconscious and partly by the mere sough and blubber of words. Poetry is not distinguished from prose, as John Livingston Lowes says in his “Convention and Revolt in Poetry,” by an exclusive phraseology, but by a peculiar attitude of mind—an attitude of self-delusion, of factdenying, of saying what isn’t true. It is essentially an effort to elude facts, whereas prose is essentially a means of unearthing and exhibiting them. The gap is bridged by sentimental prose, which is half prose and half poetry. Immediately the thing acquires a literal meaning it ceases to be poetry; immediately it becomes capable of convincing an adult and perfectly sober man during the hours between breakfast and luncheon it is indisputably prose.
Once, after plowing through sixty or seventy volumes of bad verse, I described myself as a poetry-hater. The epithet was and is absurd. The truth is that I enjoy poetry as much as the next man—when the mood is on me. But what mood? The mood, in a few words, of intellectual and spiritual fatigue, the mood of revolt against the insoluble riddle of existence, the mood of disgust and despair. Poetry, then, is a capital medicine. First its sweet music lulls, and then its artful presentation of the beautifully improbable soothes and gives surcease. It is an escape from life, like religion, like alcohol, like a pretty girl. And to the mere sensuous joy in it, to the mere low delight in getting away from the world for a bit, there is added, if the poetry be good, something vastly better, something reaching out into the realm of the intelligent, to wit, appreciation of good workmanship. A sound sonnet is almost as pleasing an object as a well-written fugue. Well, who ever heard of a finer craftsman than William Shakespeare? His music was magnificent, he played superbly upon all the common emotions—and he did it magnificently, he did it with an air. No, I am no poetry-hater. But even Shakespeare I most enjoy, not on brisk mornings when I feel fit for any deviltry, but on dreary evenings when my old war wounds are troubling me, and bills are piled up on my desk, and I am too sad to work. Then I mix a stiff dram—and read poetry.
The New Poetry
From FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS, PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES,
1927, pp. 176–77
THE TROUBLE with most of the new poets is that they are too cerebral—that they attack the problems of a fine art with the methods of science. That error runs through all their public discussions of the business. Those discussions are full of theories, by the new psychology out of the cant of the studios, that do not work and are not true. The old-time poet did not bother with theories. When the urge to write was upon him, he simply got himself into a lather, tied a towel around his head, and then tried to reduce his feelings to paper. If he had any skill the result was poetry; if he lacked skill it was nonsense. But even his worst failure still had something natural and excusable about it—it was the failure of a man admittedly somewhat feverish, with purple paint on his nose and vine-leaves in his hair. The failure of the new poet is the far more grotesque failure of a scientist who turns out to be a quack—of a mathematician who divides 20 by 4 and gets 6, of a cook who tries to make an omelette of china doorknobs.
Poetry can ne
ver be concocted by any purely intellectual process. It has nothing to do with the intellect: it is, in fact, a violent and irreconcilable enemy to the intellect. Its purpose is not to establish facts, but to evade and deny them. What it essays to do is to make life more bearable in an intolerable world by concealing and obliterating all the harsher realities. Its message is that all will be well tomorrow, or, at the latest, next Tuesday; that the grave is not cold and damp but steamheated and lined with roses; that a girl is not a viviparous mammal, full of pathogenic organisms and enlightened self-interest, but an angel with bobbed wings and a heart of gold. Take this denial of the bald and dreadful facts out of poetry—make it scientific and sensible—and it simply ceases to be what it pretends to be. It may remain good prose; it may even remain beautiful prose. But it cannot stir the blood as true poetry does; it cannot offer that soothing consolation, that escape from reality, that sovereign balm for every spiritual itch and twinge which is the great gift of poetry to man.
On Style
From THE FRINGES OF LOVELY LETTERS, PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES,
1926, pp. 196–202
WITH only one or two exceptions, all the books on prose style in English are by writers quite unable to write. The subject, indeed, seems to exercise a special and dreadful fascination over schoolma’ams, bucolic college professors, and other such pseudoliterates. In a thousand texts they set forth their depressing ideas about it, and millions of suffering high-school pupils have to study what they say. Their central aim, of course, is to reduce the whole thing to a series of simple rules—the over mastering passion of their melancholy order, at all times and everywhere. They aspire to teach it as bridge whist, the flagdrill and double-entry bookkeeping are taught. They fail as ignominiously as that Athenian of legend who essayed to train a regiment of grasshoppers in the goose-step.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 52
