However widely we may be inclined to differ with such moralistic judgments as these, it remains true that plenty of idealists hold them, and it is the idealists, rather than the followers of the senses, who have kept the love of poetry alive in our modern world.
2. A Rationalistic Objection
But the Philistines, as well as the Platonists, have an indictment to bring against modern verse, and particularly against the lyric. They find it useless and out of date. Macaulay's essay on Milton (1825) is one of the classic expressions of "Caledonian" rationalism:
"We think that as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines…. Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical…. In proportion as men know more and think more, they look less at individuals, and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems…. In an enlightened age there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy, abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones, but little poetry." In the essay on Dryden (1828) Macaulay renews the charge: "Poetry requires not an examining but a believing freedom of mind…. As knowledge is extended and as the reason develops itself, the imitative arts decay."
Even Macaulay, however, is a less pungent and amusing advocate of
rationalism than Thomas Love Peacock in The Four Ages of Poetry.
[Footnote: Reprinted in A. S. Cook's edition of Shelley's Defense of
Poetry. Boston, 1891.]
A few sentences must suffice:
"A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward…. The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveler like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life a useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest share in any one of the comforts and utilities of life, of which we have witnessed so many and so rapid advances…. We may easily conceive that the day is not distant when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been; and this not from any decrease either of intellectual power or intellectual acquisition, but because intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better channels, and have abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry of modern rimesters, and their Olympic judges, the magazine critics, who continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry as if it were still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as mathematicians, historians, politicians, and political economists, who have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and knowing how small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect, smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with which the drivelers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the poetical palm and the critical chair."
No one really knows whether Peacock was wholly serious in this diatribe, but inasmuch as it produced Shelley's Defense of Poetry "as an antidote"—as Shelley said—we should be grateful for it. Both Peacock and Macaulay wrote nearly a century ago, but their statements as to the uselessness of poetry, as compared with the value of intellectual exertion in other fields, is wholly in the spirit of twentieth-century rationalism. Few readers of this book may hold that doctrine, but they will meet it on every side; and they will need all they can remember of Sidney and Shelley and George Woodberry "as an antidote."
3. An Aesthetic Objection
In Aristotle's well-known definition of Tragedy in the fifth section of the Poetics, there is one clause, and perhaps only one, which has been accepted without debate. "A Tragedy, then, is an artistic imitation of an action that is serious, complete in itself, and of an adequate magnitude." Does a lyric possess "an adequate magnitude?" As the embodiment of a single aspect of feeling, and therefore necessarily brief, the lyric certainly lacks "mass." As an object for aesthetic contemplation, is the average lyric too small to afford the highest and most permanent pleasure? "A long poem," remarks A. C. Bradley in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry, [Footnote: London, 1909. The passage cited is from the chapter on "The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth.">[ "requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one, and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes." Surely the lyric, like the short story, cannot see life steadily and whole. It reflects, as we have seen, a single situation or desire. "Short swallow-flights of song"; piping "as the linnet sings"; have not the lyric poets themselves confessed this inherent shortcoming of their art in a thousand similes? Does not a book of lyrics often seem like a plantation of carefully tended little trees, rather than a forest? The most ardent collector of butterflies is aware that he is hunting only butterflies and not big game. Mr. John Gould Fletcher's Japanese Prints is a collection of the daintiest lyric fragments, lovely as a butterfly's wing. But do such lyrics lack "adequate magnitude"?