A Study of Poetry Part 18

CHAPTER IX

RACE, EPOCH AND INDIVIDUAL

"Unless there is a concurrence between the contemporary idioms and rhythms of a period, with the individual idiom of the lyrist, half the expressional force of his ideas will be lost."

ERNEST RHYS, Foreword to _Lyric Poetry_

We have been considering the typical qualities and forms of lyric poetry.

Let us now attempt a rapid survey of some of the conditions which have given the lyric, in certain races and periods and in the hands of certain individuals, its peculiar power.

_1. Questions that are involved_

A whole generation of so-called "scientific" criticism has come and gone since Taine's brilliant experiments with his formula of "race, period and environment" as applied to literature. Taine's _English Literature_ remains a monument to the suggestiveness and to the dangers of his method.

Some of his countrymen, notably Brunetiere in the _Evolution de la Poesie Lyrique en France au XIX Siecle_, and Legouis in the _Defense de la Poesie Francaise_, have discussed more cautiously and delicately than Taine himself the racial and historic conditions affecting lyric poetry in various periods.

The tendency at present, among critics of poetry, is to distrust formulas and to keep closely to ascertainable facts, and this tendency is surely more scientific than the most captivating theorizing. For one thing, while recognizing, as the World War has freshly compelled us to recognize, the actuality of racial differences, we have grown sceptical of the old endeavors to cla.s.sify races in simple terms, as Madame de Stael attempted to do, for instance, in her famous book on Germany. We endeavor to distinguish, more accurately than of old, between ethnic, linguistic and political divisions of men. We try to look behind the name at the thing itself: we remember that "Spanish" architecture is Arabian, and a good deal of "Gothic" is Northern French. We confess that we are only at the beginning of a true science of ethnology. "It is only in their degree of physical and mental evolution that the races of men are different,"

says Professor W. Z. Ripley, author of _Races in Europe_. The late Professor Josiah Royce admitted: "I am baffled to discover just what the results of science are regarding the true psychological and moral meaning of race differences.... All men in prehistoric times are surprisingly alike in their minds, their morals and their arts.... We do not scientifically know what the true racial varieties of mental type really are."

[Footnote: See Royce's _Race-Questions_. New York, 1908.]

I have often thought of these utterances of my colleagues, as I have attempted to teach something about lyric poetry in Harvard cla.s.srooms where Chinese, j.a.panese, Jewish, Irish, French, German, Negro, Russian, Italian and Armenian students appear in bewildering and stimulating confusion. Precisely what is their racial reaction to a lyric of Sappho?

To an Anglo-Saxon war-song of the tenth century? To a Scotch ballad? To one of Shakspere's songs? Some specific racial reaction there must be, one imagines, but such capacity for self-expression as the student commands is rarely capable of giving more than a hint of it.

And what real response is there, among the majority of contemporary lovers of poetry, to the delicate shades of feeling which color the verse of specific periods in the various national literatures? We all use catch-words, and I shall use them myself later in this chapter, in the attempt to indicate the changes in lyric atmosphere as we pa.s.s, for instance, from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean age, or from the "Augustan"

to the Romantic epoch in English literature. Is this sensitiveness to the temper of various historic periods merely the possession of a few hundred professional scholars, who have trained themselves, like Walter Pater, to live in some well-chosen moment of the past and to find in their hyper-sensitized responsiveness to its voices a sort of consolation prize for their isolation from the present? Race-mindedness is common, no doubt, but difficult to express in words: historic-mindedness, though more capable of expression, is necessarily confined to a few. Is the response to the poetry of past epochs, then, chiefly a response of the individual reader to an individual poet, and do we cross the frontiers of race and language and historic periods with the main purpose of finding a man after our own heart? Or is the secret of our pleasure in the poetry of alien races and far-off times simply this: that nothing human is really alien, and that poetry through its generalizing, universalizing power, reveals to us the essential oneness of mankind?

_2. Graphic Arts and the Lyric_

A specific ill.u.s.tration may suggest an answer. An American collector of j.a.panese prints recognizes in these specimens of Oriental craftsmans.h.i.+p that mastery of line and composition which are a part of the universal language of the graphic arts. Any human being, in fact, who has developed a sensitiveness to artistic beauty will receive a measure of delight from the work of j.a.panese masters. A few strokes of the brush upon silk, a bit of lacquer work, the decoration of a sword-hilt, are enough to set his eye dancing. But the expert collector soon pa.s.ses beyond this general enthusiasm into a quite particular interest in the handicraft of special artists,--a Moton.o.bu, let us say, or a Sess.h.i.+u. The collector finds his pleasure in their individual handling of artistic problems, their unique faculties of eye and hand. He responds, in a word, both to the cosmopolitan language employed by every pract.i.tioner of the fine arts, and to the local idiom, the personal accent, of, let us say, a certain j.a.panese draughtsman of the eighteenth century.

And now take, by way of confirmation and also of contrast, the att.i.tude of an American lover of poetry toward those specimens of j.a.panese and Chinese lyrics which have recently been presented to us in English translations.

The American's ignorance of the riental languages cuts him off from any appreciation of the individual handling of diction and metre. A Lafcadio Hearn may write delightfully about that special seventeen syllable form of j.a.panese verse known as the _hokku_. Here is a _hokku_ by Basho, one of the most skilled composers in that form. Hearn prints it with the translation, [Footnote: _Kwaidan_, p. 188. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904.]

and explains that the verses are intended to suggest the joyous feeling of spring-time:

"Oki, oki yo!

Waga tomo ni sen Neru--kocho!"

(Wake up! Wake up!--I will make thee my comrade, thou sleeping b.u.t.terfly.) An Occidental reader may recognize, through the translation, the charm of the poetic image, and he may be interested in a technical lyric form hitherto new to him, but beyond this, in his ignorance of j.a.panese, he cannot go. Here is a lyric by w.a.n.g Ch'ang-Ling, a Chinese poet of the eighth century:

_Tears in the Spring_ [Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_, London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

"Clad in blue silk and bright embroidery At the first call of Spring the fair young bride, On whom as yet Sorrow has laid no scar, Climbs the Kingfisher's Tower. Suddenly She sees the bloom of willows far and wide, And grieves for him she lent to fame and war."

And here is another spring lyric by Po Chu-I (A.D. 772-846), as clear and simple as anything in the Greek Anthology:

_The Gra.s.s_ [Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from _The Lute of Jade_, London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

"How beautiful and fresh the gra.s.s returns!

When golden days decline, the meadow burns; Yet autumn suns no hidden root have slain, The spring winds blow, and there is gra.s.s again.

"Green rioting on olden ways it falls: The blue sky storms the ruined city walls; Yet since w.a.n.g Sun departed long ago, When the gra.s.s blooms both joy and fear I know."

The Western reader, although wholly at the mercy of the translator, recognizes the pathos and beauty of the scene and thought expressed by the Chinese poet. But all that is specifically Chinese in lyric form is lost to him.

I have purposely chosen these Oriental types of lyric because they represent so clearly the difference between the universal language of the graphic arts and the more specialized language of poetry. The latter is still able to convey, even through translation, a suggestion of the emotions common to all men; and this is true of the verse which lies wholly outside the line of that Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition which has affected so profoundly the development of modern European literature. Yet to express "_ce que tout le monde pense_"--which was Boileau's version of Horace's "_propria communia dicere_"--is only part of the function of lyric poetry. To give the body of the time the form and pressure of individual feeling, of individual artistic mastery of the language of one's race and epoch;--this, no less than the other, is the task and the opportunity of the lyric poet.

_3. Decay and Survival_

To appreciate the triumph of whatever lyrics have survived, even when sheltered by the protection of common racial or cultural traditions, one must remember that the overwhelming majority of lyrics, like the majority of artistic products of all ages and races and stages of civilization, are irretrievably lost. Weak-winged is song! A book like Gummere's _Beginnings of Poetry_, glancing as it does at the origins of so many national literatures and at the rudimentary poetic efforts of various races that have never emerged from barbarism, gives one a poignant sense of the prodigality of the song-impulse compared with the slenderness of the actual survivals. Autumn leaves are not more fugitive. Even when preserved by sacred ritual, like the Vedas and the Hebrew Psalter, what we possess is only an infinitesimal fraction of what has perished. The Sibyl tears leaf after leaf from her precious volume and scatters them to the winds.

How many glorious Hebrew war-songs of the type presented in the "Song of Deborah" were chanted only to be forgotten! We have but a handful of the lyrics of Sappho and of the odes of Pindar, while the fragments of lyric verse gathered up in the _Greek Anthology_ tantalize us with their reminder of what has been lost beyond recall.

Yet if we keep to the line of Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition, we are equally impressed with the enduring influence of the few lyrics that have survived. The Hebrew lyric, in its diction, its rhythmical patterns, and above all in its flaming intensity of spirit, bears the marks of racial purity, of mental vigor and moral elevation. It became something even more significant, however, than the spiritual expression of a chosen race. The East met the West when these ancient songs of the Hebrew Psalter were adopted and sung by the Christian Church. They were translated, in the fourth century, into the Latin of the Vulgate. Many an Anglo-Saxon gleeman knew that Latin version. It moulded century after century the liturgy of the European world. It influenced Tyndale's English version of the Psalms, and this has in turn affected the whole vocabulary and style of the modern English lyric. There is scarcely a page of the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ which does not betray in word or phrase the influence of the Hebrew Psalter.

Or take that other marvelous example of the expression of emotion in terms of bodily sensation, the lyric of the Greeks. Its clarity and unity, its dislike of vagueness and excess, its finely artistic restraint, are characteristic of the race. The simpler Greek lyrical measures were taken over by Catullus, Horace and Ovid, and though there were subtle qualities of the Greek models which escaped the Roman imitators, the Greco-Roman or "cla.s.sic" restraint of over-turbulent emotions became a European heritage.

It is doubtless true, as Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has pointed out, [Footnote: See his _Cla.s.sical Heritage of the Middle Ages_, chap. 9, and particularly the pa.s.sage quoted in the "Notes and Ill.u.s.trations" to chap.

v of this volume.]

that the Greek and Roman cla.s.sical metres became in time inadequate to express the new Christian spirit "which knew neither clarity nor measure."

"The antique sense of form and proportion, the antique observance of the mean and avoidance of extravagance and excess, the antique dislike for the unlimited or the monstrous, the antique feeling for literary unity, and abstention from irrelevancy, the frank love for all that is beautiful or charming, for the beauty of the body and for everything connected with the joy of mortal life, the antique reticence as to hopes or fears of what was beyond the grave,--these qualities cease in medieval Latin poetry."

_4. Lyrics of Western Europe_

The racial characteristics of the peoples of Western Europe began to show themselves even in their Latin poetry, but it is naturally in the rise of the vernacular literatures, during the Middle Ages, that we trace the signs of thnic differentiation. Teuton and Frank and Norseman, Spaniard or Italian, betray their blood as soon as they begin to sing in their own tongue. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse are colored with the love of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds, with the pa.s.sion of loyalty to a leader. Read "Deor's Lament," "Widsith,"

"The Wanderer," "The Sea-farer," or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon _Chronicle_.

[Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, _Select Translations from Old English Poetry_ (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, _Early English Poems_ (New York, 1911).]

The last strophe of "Deor's Lament," our oldest English lyric, ends with the line:

_"Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg"_ _"That he surmounted, so this may I!"_

The wandering Ulysses says something like this, it is true, in a line of the _Odyssey_, but to feel its English racial quality one has only to read after it Masefield's "To-morrow":

"Oh yesterday our little troop was ridden through and through, Our swaying, tattered pennons fled, a broken beaten few, And all a summer afternoon they hunted us and slew; _But to-morrow, By the living G.o.d, we 'II try the game again_!"

When Taillefer, knight and minstrel, rode in front of the Norman line at the battle of Hastings, "singing of Charlemagne and of Roland and of Oliver and the va.s.sals who fell at Roncevaux," he typified the coming triumphs of French song in England.

[Footnote: See E. B. Reed, _English Lyrical Poetry_, chap. 2. 1912.]

French lyrical fas.h.i.+ons would have won their way, no doubt, had there been no battle of Hastings. The banners of William the Conqueror had been blessed by Rome. They represented Europe, and the inevitable flooding of the island outpost of "Germania" by the tide of European civilization.

_Chanson_ and _carole_, dance-songs, troubadour lyrics, the _ballade_, _rondel_ and _Noel_, amorous songs of French courtiers, pious hymns of French monks, began to sing themselves in England. The new grace and delicacy is upon every page of Chaucer. What was first Provencal and then French, became English when Chaucer touched it. From the shadow and grimness and elegiac pathos of Old English poetry we come suddenly into the light and color and gayety of Southern France.

[Footnote: See the pa.s.sage from Legouis quoted in the "Notes and Ill.u.s.trations" for this chapter.]

In place of Caedmon's terrible picture of h.e.l.l--"ever fire or frost"--or Dunbar's "Lament for the Makers" (_Oxford_, No. 21) with its refrain:

"_Timor Mortis conturbat me,_"

or the haunting burden of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge" (_Oxford_, No. 381),

"This ae nighte, this ae nighte, _--Every nighte and alle,_ Fire and sleet and candle-lighte, _And Christe receive thy saule_,"

we now find English poets echoing _Auca.s.sin and Nicolette_: