There is a great deal of literature or poetry which presupposes some culture, and a sensitiveness to beauty, and especially a highly developed intellect. The man with the commonplace mind, even though he be educated and well read, is often unable to appreciate the beauty of poetry in which new and advanced and unpopular ideas are held in solution. The poetry in the work of Whitman and Nietzsche and Ibsen was not felt by people who could not enter into the spirit of their revolt from contemporary morality. The public cannot appreciate the prose poetry of Hearn because of his rich language and aesthetic sensitiveness.
The public can take an interest in the beauty and poetry of ideas it understands, and written in language that it speaks and in images that it uses; but the poet is often at his best an aristocrat in thought and language,
and then it takes a well trained individual reader to like him. Poetry is no longer mere folklore or ballads or musical numbers, all of which the public may enjoy.
There is no such thing as absolute truth. Truth is only a relative term. When a man speaks of the truth he means those doctrines which he himself embraces. Every man believes that the views that he entertains are true, otherwise he would not hold them. Many people have in the past died for the "truth," when we know that they upheld falsehood.
A writer who is liberally inclined will hold liberal ideas to be the truth; a conservative regards only conservative views as true. An author who embraces ideas from both the conventional and radical spheres, considers only those books as true whose authors do the same thing.
In a sane essay on De Vigny, Mill makes a remarkable distinction between the conservative and radical poet, concluding that the greatest poet will always partake of the nature of both, mentioning as example Balzac and De Vigny. Had he written on the subject a half-century later he might have named Ibsen, whose Brond and Wild Duck are good conservative poems. Mill, who was no disciple of art for art's sake, said that the radical poet will paint passionate love, "will show it at war with the forms and customs of society, nay even with its laws and religion, if the laws and tenets which regulate that branch of human relations are among those which have begun to be murmured against." "To him, whatever exists will appear from that alone fit to be represented: to probe the wounds of society and humanity is part of his business, and he will neither shrink from exhibiting what is in nature, because it is morally culpable, nor because it is physically revolting." Here Mill
anticipates Zola, Ibsen and Freud. No wonder that so radical a critic as Brandes was attracted to him. It is a pity he did not continue literary criticism.
It is probably vain to try to define different types of poetic or literary excellence, but we may state some of these. Formerly a first-class poet was one who successfully imitated a model and followed certain rules. Or he was one who successfully voiced the current accepted views of the age. It is these reasons that still make many people consider Dante and Milton among the first-class poets. Again there is a tendency to regard as poets of the first class those who perfected their art technically. Hence Æschylus and Sophocles are ranked among the greatest poets. Sometimes he is regarded among the greatest poets because he is among the earliest, like Homer. The position of poets like Shakespeare, Molière, Cervantes and Goethe as first-class world poets and writers, cannot be contested, because they are so universal.
Under the influence of Ibsen, Shaw in his preface to a new edition of his novel The Irrational Knot laid down an interesting distinction between literature of the first and of the second order. The distinction applies to poetry as well. Shaw considered as literature of the first order work which makes a distinct original contribution to morality, even if such writing is literary criticism. He regards the writers who accept ready-made morality as of the second order. Shaw admits that writers of the first order are often less readable and less constructive than writers of the second order. He mentions among writers of the first order, Ibsen, Euripides, Byron, Wilde and La Rochefoucauld, and Shakespeare in Hamlet. From prefaces in other books of his we know he would include men like Blake, Shelley,
Nietzsche, and Butler. As writers of the second order he mentions Shakespeare, Scott, Dumas, Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle, and he would no doubt include writers like Macaulay and Holmes. He does not mean that a writer of the first order is always greater than one of the second order, but he does insist as follows: "No man who shuts his eyes and opens his mouth when religion and morality are offered to him on a long spoon, can share the same Parnassian bench with those who make an original contribution to religion and morality, were it only a criticism." In spite of the contention of the art for art's sake school that poetry has nothing to do with morality or religion, the greatest poets are those authors of the literature of ecstasy who championed new ideas, fought for liberty in their works, expressed the advanced ideas of the age, and gave us a new and more liberal outlook on life. While it is true that often poets of the second order have expressed strongly and movingly just the common sentiments of everybody, on the whole the original poets rank higher. It is this which puts Whitman above Longfellow, Nietzsche above Macaulay, Byron and Shelley above Tennyson and Rossetti, Ibsen above Scott. Yet there are many poets who made no distinct original contribution to a new morality, but expressed common emotions so humanely, and powerfully, that we think of them as poets of a very high order. The Dickens of the Christmas Carol and the Burns of the love songs were not original but they are great nevertheless by the infectious depicting of universal emotion, which is always of highest importance in literature. Though there is nothing new in a novel like Eugénie Grandet but a wonderful description of a miser, it is poetry of a very high order, for an account of a passion in an intense manner is great poetry. Most of