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 Brunetière in the Evolution de la Poésie Lyrique en France au XIX Siècle, and Legouis in the Défense de la Poésie Française, 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 classify races in simple terms, as Madame de Staël 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 classrooms where Chinese, Japanese, 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 pass, 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 illustration may suggest an answer. An American collector of Japanese prints recognizes in these specimens of Oriental craftsmanship 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 Japanese 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 passes beyond this general enthusiasm into a quite particular interest in the handicraft of special artists,—a Motonobu, let us say, or a Sesshiu. 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 practitioner of the fine arts, and to the local idiom, the personal accent, of, let us say, a certain Japanese draughtsman of the eighteenth century.
And now take, by way of confirmation and also of contrast, the attitude of an American lover of poetry toward those specimens of Japanese 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 Japanese 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
Néru—kocho!"
(Wake up! Wake up!—I will make thee my comrade, thou sleeping butterfly.) 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 Japanese, he cannot go. Here is a lyric by Wang 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.]