The Literature of Ecstasy Part 12

Incidentally one may add that is why the great medieval Hebrew poets like Solomon Ibn Gebirol, Jehudah Ha Levi and Moses Ibn Ezra, are great poets.[172:A]

Heine in his poem on _Jehuda Ben Halevi_ deplores the fact that these three poets are not well known to Aryan peoples. In fact the liturgical poetry of the medieval Hebrew poets is non-sectarian and can be appreciated by any lover of the literature of ecstasy. Any reader of poetry may be moved by Jehudah Ha Levi's _Ode to Zion_, or Bachya Ibn Pakuda's _My Soul_. There are able prose translations of these in B.

Halper's _Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature. An Anthology_, Vol. II.

Any one who reads the history of the poetry of a country, that is, of the poetry in verse, will find much to amuse him in the alleged progress made in the conventions of poetry. One poet dethrones another and the reader gets the impression that the later poet is always superior to the earlier one because he has destroyed convention, and introduced what is often a minor change. The eighteenth century rated Chaucer and Spenser rather low, the nineteenth century killed off Dryden and Pope, Tennyson and Browning were a.s.sumed to have advanced upon Byron and Sh.e.l.ley, and the mid-Victorians in turn were deemed to have been supplanted by the poets of "the nineties." Though a later age may make some technical improvements in the art of writing poetry, it is genius that counts.

Many problems about poetry have disturbed critics since Byron died, but none of the succeeding generations have been able to detract from the quality of poets like Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley and Keats. For a poet is such by virtue of his ability to convey great emotion and thought, and he does not become obsolete solely by the technical innovations of a later age.

Many poets are praised for the "note of revolt" in their poetry, because they have brought about some changes in the technical art of writing poetry, or have written their poetry in a manner different from the ancients only in form. But let us never lose sight of the fact that these changes which are considered tokens of great courage on the part of the innovators, amount to very little when these so-called audacious poets remain on an intellectual and moral level with the ma.s.ses and do not rise as high as the older poet whose vision soared ahead of his time.

A poet may be great even though he uses the old machinery of the supernatural, even though he indulges in artificial diction, cliches and stereotyped metres, for what counts in poetry is the greatness and power of a human soul and personality, the ecstatic presentation of an advanced point of view, his share as a battler for truth, freedom and justice, the intensity and importance of his emotion. People are under the impression that all the martyrs for human liberty perished in the medieval ages; that the world has been set free by those who gave up their lives to liberate humanity from kings and priests, and that there is no more work to be done by poets to-day in championing human liberty.

Critics who admire Milton and Sh.e.l.ley as champions of liberty attack to-day's unpopular champions of it. It amuses one to read of the epithets, revolutionary and radical, applied to versifiers because they have arranged a system of vowel-sounds combination in their poems, or imported a metre, or broken with an old conventional metre, while the substance of their poetry remains far below the intellectual and aesthetic level of poets who lived many centuries ago.

But what greater poetry has been produced in the last two generations, than many of the novels and prose dramas written in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, England and Scandinavia? Why is there greatness in the poetry in these works? Is it not because of the character drawing, the delineation of great emotional conflicts, of the ecstasy bathing the ideas? Would these poets have been any the less great, had they continued to use the same ideas, emotions and situations, tricked out even in the old conventional forms of rhyme, metre, tropes, allegories, high personages, supernatural agencies? In fact plays like _Peer Gynt_ and _The Sunken Bell_ are rather technically conventional as verse plays, but could any one compare with them the vapid, senseless and trite lyrics created by some of our so-called modern "revolutionary"

poets? The great poet who deals with the capabilities of man in experiencing emotion, and fears not to track the human soul, even into morbid feelings, who has the courage to challenge society with ideas, even though these arouse the most bitter antagonism of some of the leaders of society, is the man whom posterity will most enjoy, for he is most human and bold and he never loses sight of the fact that he deals with real ecstasy, and not with the cultivated nuances of some cliques of versifiers.

If the reader will make a close study of many of the revolutions in writing poetry, he will find that the great change often amounted to nothing more than the subst.i.tution or creation of a new rhythm or trope for the one used by the old poet; such changes are of minor importance.

No doubt our contemporary poets have done away with many conventions.

They no longer employ inversions of words and phrases, nor cultivate the stock poetical terms and words allowed formerly as a matter of poetic license. They no longer tolerate cliches such as whenas, o'er, whatime, dost, 'mongst, anon, ere, morn, even, o'er, main, taen, athwart, e'en, forsooth, alack, oh thou, didst, hath, perchance, methinks, steed, gleeds, prithee, trow, 'neath, 'gainst, ween, wist, espy, twixt. But it took them a long time to discover what the prose writers always knew; namely, that distorted speech should be avoided in literature. But the avoidance of cliches does not make a poet.

Some of our so-called modern free verse poets like Amy Lowell are artificial in substance and manner, labored and uninspired, dull and bookish, and lacking in human interest, ecstasy and ideas. Their technique may be different from that of the old poets, but these new writers often have no ideas, reveal no poetic personality, and convey no emotion. Many of them are afraid of being personal, and as a result they fall below even the old New England poets whom they despise. A poet like Longfellow may be deficient in intellectual power and sympathy with liberal and democratic ideas, but when he tells a tale of such human interest as _Evangeline_, presents an idea against war as in _The a.r.s.enal at Springfield_, or draws on his personal life in such fine lyrics as _My Lost Youth_, _The Bridge_, _The Day is Done_, he moves us and we know we are reading poetry, though it has not the emanc.i.p.ating and stimulating effect of some of the work of Walt Whitman. Lafcadio Hearn, by the way, condemned the tendency to depreciate Longfellow.

Many of our free verse writers produce no great poetry, even though they write in a medium that is the proper language of poetry. The opponents of the free verse writers, who see no merit in many of the latter's productions, are often right; these productions are not poetry because they lack ecstasy and ideas. Much of the work in the old forms produced to-day has more ecstasy, and hence it is poetry.

Determination of the merits of the poets of eminence to-day is outside the scope of this volume.

There has been much comment about the fact that we need and indeed are getting an American or national poetry. Now one of the things that Whitman has overdone was this demand for poetry that is distinctly American. Poetry appeals to the universal element in man first. A great idea like a pa.s.sage in the _Song of Myself_ could have been written by and can be appreciated by the people of another nation. A cry of sympathy for the sufferings of animals and man such as you find in _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_ is not an American but a human note.

You can translate a love poem from the Greek, Latin, German, French or Italian into English prose, and if you remove the proper names or other unessential adjuncts, no expert or scholar will be able to tell what nationality the poem represents. No one has better shown the hollowness of the claimants for nationalism than James Russell Lowell in two essays on nationality in literature, one written in sympathetic review of Longfellow's _Kavanagh_ and collected in _The Round Table_, and another in review of Piatt's poems, collected in _The Function of the Poet_.

Goethe, before Lowell, ridiculed the idea of purely national poetry.

True, there are national traits and characteristics, modes of thought and feeling peculiar to different peoples, that enter into and distinguish every literature, but these do not usually make one literature so national as to be incomprehensible to other nations. When this does happen, the product has no universal appeal and hence is not great poetry. Again poetry may have local color; it may be steeped in national traditions, it may express a racial philosophy but it is then of value only in so far as it represents the mode of thinking and feeling of the rest of mankind. Poetry may be rooted in the soil, be an indigenous product, depict native customs or a provincial life; it may depict certain types of heroes, and glory in the country of its birth, and describe its richness, but all these features are incidentals. Human nature is much the same the world over. Feeling is universal, though it may be colored by national traits, though one nation may feel more keenly, or indulge a certain emotion more frequently than others. The heart and the head, the emotions and the mind, rule in writing. The _Old Testament_ and Shakespeare are no longer national products for they speak to the whole world. They have the local color and the ideas of their time and depict a certain phase of life, but we all feel in reading these books that they are written about ourselves and to ourselves. "We have spoken too much about nationalist art, forgetting that though the roots may lie in nationality and personality, the results, independent of school and nation, should overleap boundaries and enter the universal heart." (Isaac Goldberg, _Studies in Spanish-American Literature_.)

Poetry then grows out of the soil, but like imported fruit tastes as well to the man a thousand miles away as to the native.

The literature of a country however should be individualistic, not imitative. Whitman is an American poet in the sense of recording his own individuality, while Lowell is a transplanted Englishman. It is only a Whitman rather than a Lowell who could have written the following pa.s.sages, which appear in the famous Preface to the first edition of _Leaves of Gra.s.s_.

In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever man and woman exist--but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of the ages are worthy the grand idea--to them it is confided, and they must sustain it.

Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it.

I do not mean that the author of that bold poem in the first Bigelow Paper, against the recruiting sergeant, and of the lecture on _Democracy_, was not, in spite of his dislike of Whitman, in accord with the above quoted pa.s.sage. Nor do I mean that he could not have learned to write a pa.s.sage like that from the nation which gave us such fine prose poems in defence of liberty as Milton's _Areopagitica_, Locke's _Letters on Toleration_, Jeremy Taylor's _Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying_, Mill's _Liberty_ and Morley's _Compromise_. But Whitman was the first American poet who taking his cue from American political doc.u.ments embodied in his poetry views of political and individual liberty, as the fruit of democracy. Even Whitman stopped short of championing economic liberty. Some of his present-day disciples do champion it. But Whitman's plea for liberty does not make him a national poet, for European poets have also sung of liberty.

FOOTNOTES:

[172:A] The greatest authority in America on medieval Hebrew poetry is Prof. Israel Davidson of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York City.

CHAPTER X

LITERATURE OF ECSTASY EMANATES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS

Aristotle's best known contribution to literary criticism is his statement that tragedy has the effect of a catharsis upon the reader and helps him to discharge emotions of pity and fear that overburden him. We have considerably amplified Aristotle's views, as we include under tragedy the recording of any very painful event in prose or verse, in dialogue or narrative. We believe that perusing literature in general relieves the reader of all nerve-racking emotions and produces a homeopathic effect upon him by the aesthetic voicing of his unconscious feelings.

Professor J. E. Spingarn's book, _Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_, gives us a good survey of several Italian commentators who correctly interpreted Aristotle's view of the purgation of the emotions of fear and pity as aesthetic, and not ethical. The first of these critics was Robortelli (1548); Vettori and Castelvetro followed him, while Maggi and Varchi applied the purgation to all emotions similar to pity and fear, a more Freudian conception. Minturno likened the purgation to the physician's method, while Speroni pointed out that pity and fear, holding men in bondage, were properly to be expurgated. These men antic.i.p.ated the great work of Bernays in the nineteenth century, who destroyed the centuries-old fallacy that Aristotle had in mind the moral purification and reformation of the reader. Even Lessing erroneously thought that this was Aristotle's meaning.

Moreover, Milton, who had traveled in Italy, must have read these Italians when he gave us his correct interpretation of the pa.s.sage in the preface to _Samson Agonistes_. Milton properly understood Aristotle's meaning of the function of tragedy. It was to "temper and reduce them (the pa.s.sions) to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those pa.s.sions well imitated."

We know now the true interpretation of Aristotle's view of the function of tragedy from a pa.s.sage in his _Politics_. He was thinking of the relief the spectators' surcharged emotions obtained by witnessing similar emotions expressed. His real meaning was perceived by Henri Weil and Jacob Bernays, two great Jewish cla.s.sical scholars of Germany.

Bernays states moreover in his work,[180:A] first published in 1857, that any literary work telling of unhappy events has a homeopathic effect on the reader. This is true, for even if we do not actually suffer, the capacity and possibility of suffering are latent within us.

Though Bosanquet, commenting on Bernays in his _History of Aesthetics_, believes tragedy or poetry must be written in verse, he is forced to admit that even _Vanity Fair_ and _Cousin Bette_ would come within the definition of tragedy developed by Bernays; for the reader finds his own emotions expressed in these works no less than in Sophocles and obtains relief when he reads them. Bosanquet further admits that any serious and even formless portrayal of life may be placed within Bernays's theory adding, "It may indeed be admitted to be a development inherent in Aristotle's theory."

Aristotle perceived that the spectator of tragedy was putting himself in the place of the characters, living their lives emotionally and sympathizing with them. Since the novel or lyric poem depicts human sorrow, and the reader is purged by reading these literary forms, just like the spectator of tragedy, all literature has the effect of an aesthetic catharsis upon the reader.

The novels of Thackeray and Balzac are poetry in parts and the emotional influence in reading them is the same as in seeing a tragic verse-play acted. Bosanquet, however, does not fully accept Aristotle's theory as applied to tragic stories in prose because he regards poetical prose rhetoric and not poetry. Would he exclude from the domain of tragedy the entire episode in Hardy's _Return of the Native_, of the death of Eustace's mother? Hardy's tragedy is as real as the tragedies of the Greek playwrights. The novel fulfills all the requirements of poetic tragedy in that the reader is purged and relieved of pity and fear and kindred emotions. For tragedy is not to be found only in dialogues in verse, but in narration and dialogue in prose, and its function is to relieve us of any choking emotion, besides fear and pity.

Aristotle is the founder then of psychoa.n.a.lytic interpretation of literature and is a forerunner of Freud. He however refers only to the catharsis upon the spectator, but not to that of the author's work upon himself.

Every creator of tragedy in prose or verse, in fiction, essay or lyric was first subject to repression and then ecstasy. We may say as Nietzsche did, that tragic art is the reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysius, of dreaming and emotional intoxication, and both these conditions are, in Freud's words, due to repression.

But we have travelled far beyond Aristotle in our views of tragedy.

Freud has revolutionized the art of criticism and a disciple of his, F.

Wittels, in the _Tragische Motiv_, gave us an interpretation from the psychoa.n.a.lytic point of view of the nature and sufferings of tragic characters. There is an abstract of the book by Dr. J. S. Van Teslaar in the _American Journal of Psychology_ for April, 1912. Wittels shows that the unconscious unethical desires break into consciousness and cause tragedy. He points out that the Greeks were purified of pent up emotions in the theater, and that they identified the demons of their inner self in the actors. He also says that the Greek drama cannot any longer talk as clearly to us as of old, for with our civilization we have wandered away from the nave Greek mind. The author emphasizes the fact that unconscious causes make the writer compose his work, as well as the fact that characters in history and literature acted from unconscious causes. Thus suppressed erotic impulses influenced the patriotism of Joan of Arc.

At all times, again, it was vaguely understood that dreams reveal the unconscious, that poetry emanates from the dream state, that in fact poems are even composed in dreams. Thus, the Bible itself is authority for the fact that all the prophets received their messages in a dream or vision. The Hebrew sages said that the dream was a fraction of prophecy, the unripe fruit of prophecy.

One of the first critics who treated at length the question whether poetry may actually be composed in dreams is the Hebrew poet and critic Moses Ibn Ezra, who lived in Spain in the early part of the twelfth century. The seventh chapter of his _Conversations and Recollections_[182:A] deals with the subject. He was influenced by Arabs who were absorbingly concerned with the interpretation of dreams. Ibn Ezra thought that it was just in the sleeping state that the use of thought and imagination was greatest, for then the soul loses consciousness of things, the body and senses are at rest and only the common sense, which the critic uses really as synonymous with the unconscious, is active. He quotes a Hebrew philosopher to the effect that the soul, when detached from the body, has finer perceptions than when awake. This is in accordance with Aristotle who said that the soul can discover hidden things when detached from the senses, when it is pure. Ibn Ezra a.s.serts that his Hebrew authority maintains that one may compose verses in sleep, and he gives examples of his own.

Ibn Ezra believed that nightmares have some idea behind them, that an interpreter of dreams whose reason is superior to that of the dreamer can discover the idea, for dream interpretation is the science of hidden things communicated by G.o.d. The poet also composes verses in dreams, often because he does this in waking life, for many people carry on in their dreams the occupations of their daily life. We all recall that we read in our dreams, especially if we are lovers of reading. We do in our dreams what we would like to do.

The Aristotelian medieval Hebrew philosophers, Isaac Israeli, Abraham Ibn Daud, Moses Maimomides, and Levi ben Gerson also developed the idea of the connection of prophecy with dreams.[183:A]

We know to-day that the poet creates a congenial surrounding for himself out of his imagination. He is repelled by the sordidness of his environment or the suffering he has had in life. He writes a poem like _Epipsychidion_, to build himself a home where he has ideal love, because he is not satisfied with his married life. He writes a prose poem like _Dream Children_ where he sees himself wedded to his lost love, with their children about him, because he is a bachelor who has neither love nor children.

Poetry, like dreams, creates a state where unfulfilled unconscious wishes are gratified. Poetry is the voice then of the unconscious. The poem is usually a product of the day-dream, which is related to the dream of sleep, for both species of dreams reveal the unconscious.

Poetry shows conflicts and makes adjustments to reality. Poetry is aesthetic therapeutics.[184:A]

The dream poems of literature are so numerous that one is amazed that the theory of poetry as a dream has not been more prominently discussed by literary critics. In the middle ages many poems were cast in the form of dreams. The allegory was generally a dream. Who can doubt that the _Divine Comedy_ and _Pilgrim's Progress_, both in the form of dreams, were attempts by the poets to adjust themselves to reality, to purge themselves and relieve their unconscious?

Even those poets who are always hiding their souls and making inlays of verbal mosaic reveal themselves. Their dabbling with trifles is indicative of an inability or lack of courage to think and feel. They thus make a disclosure more marked than if they had sung their private thoughts openly.

Poetry is a psychological art rather than a plastic one. It deals with the soul. Horace's statement that if the poet would make the reader weep he must weep himself, is true. Yet we have often failed to recognize that poetry is a genuine personal cry of a man who dreams. We have confused poetry with prosody, instead of identifying it with the unconscious.

The poem with the social message, the problem play for example, or the novel with a purpose, also belongs to the literature of dreams. The poet sees foul infections infiltrating society; he has often himself been a victim of social abuses. He voices complaints about the unjust system and its tyrannical sway. He shows himself and others suffering in its coils. He dreams a vision of a more beautiful and just system of society where neither he nor others are consumed in vexation. He states ecstatically the ideas that come to him as he condemns; he entertains and expresses views whose adoption would enable man to reconstruct society on a better plan.

His intellect is colored by his inability to adjust himself socially.

His dreams give him ideas. He does not have to become a reformer, but he recognizes social wrongs resulting from custom or stupidity or downright wickedness. Personal repression and dreaming produce not only love poems, but poems containing utopias of society, plans for improvement.