CHAPTER VIII
THE TRIUMPH OF THE ARTIST
From this brief raid upon the territory of poetic style, we return to the fortunes of improvisation and its defeat at the hands of a more deliberate art.[[1142]] Among the countless passages in which the poet has talked of his profession, not the least notable is that impromptu of De Musset in which he says:—
Faire un travail exquis, plein de crainte et de charme,
Faire une perle d’une larme,
Du poëte ici-bas voila la passion,—
that is, of the poet whom one takes seriously, the artist, the solitary maker of things beautiful. Quite different is the idea of the poet implied in a pleasant little jest that passed between De Musset and Sainte-Beuve. The critic had declared that in the majority of men there is a poet who dies young while the man himself survives; whereupon De Musset pointed out that Sainte-Beuve had unwittingly put his thought into a good Alexandrine, and thus had helped to prove that the poet in the case was not dead but asleep. Between this poet who dies young or slumbers in each of us, and the artist in verse who makes pearls out of tears, there is now only a fantastic and fugitive connection; in mediæval times, in rude agricultural communities, and under primitive conditions, this slumbering poet was awake and active, and the step from his ranks to that of artistry was of the easiest and shortest kind. The story of the poet is simple. Detaching himself from the throng in short improvisations, he comes at last to independence, and turns his active fellows into a mute audience; dignity and mystery hedge him about, his art is touched with the divine, and like his brother, the priest, he mediates between men and an imaginative, spiritual world, living, too, like the priest, at the charges of the community. This was the upward path; another path led the minstrel into ways of disrepute, where dignity and mystery were unknown, where the songsmith was made a sturdy beggar and an outlaw by act of parliament, and where there was little comfort even in being the singing-man at Windsor. With the upward path there is no space here to deal; the poet by divine right, moreover, has had chroniclers enough and to spare, and it only remains to note the later stages through which his communal brother passed on the way to what seems an everlasting silence.
As the chosen singer stands out single from the throng and the throng lapses passive into the background, so the poem which this singer makes becomes a traditional and remembered affair, with epic movement and an interest which causes art and substance of the song to outweigh any mere expression of contemporary emotion. This, indeed, lingers in the chorus or refrain of a ballad; but even the choral impulse passes away as the story and the style of the poem increase in importance, and it disappears behind the rhapsode,[[1143]] who chants or recites his verses to a listening crowd. With permanent record, with the making of manuscript,[[1144]] poetic art at its best ceases to be a matter of voice and ear; two silent men, the poet and his reader, communicate by means of the written or the printed page, itself the result of solitary thought, and subject, at the other end of the process, to the same deliberation and inference in the appreciation of it as the poet employed in the making.[[1145]] But the obvious advantages of immediate contact, of living voice, gesture, personal emotion, in the poet, and palpable interest, whether active or passive, on the part of the audience, made the disintegration and decay of this primitive group a very slow affair. It survives even yet in the popular “reading,” and, with higher pretensions, on the stage; but a far more interesting survival, and more complete, is found among that people of strong poetic impulses who gave the improvvisatore his place of honour down to quite recent times. The art was so common that it got the compliment of parody; Pulci imitates the improvvisatori in his Morgante,[[1146]] and worse yet, the luckless bards who made extemporaneous verses at the table of Leo X were whipped if these verses were not of the smoothest. But this is only the shady side of the art. Quadrio[[1147]] thinks that if the human mind anywhere puts forth its noblest powers, it is in that craft called canto all’ improvviso;[[1148]] this, he says, was the beginning of poetry, and is still one of its best achievements; and he goes on to give some hints for the ambitious. Every one knows the romantic figure of Corinne; but a better example for the present purpose is Perfetti, an actual improvvisatore whose feats drew attention abroad as well as at home. He is mentioned in Spence’s Anecdotes; and a few facts about him[[1149]] may be given here in order to show how the fatal breach between poetry of mere entertainment, now in full process of degeneration at the hands of the minstrel and balladmonger, and poetry of creative and imaginative art, now veiled in mystery and seen of none but consecrated eyes, was thought to be healed by the rapt strains of these improvising poets of Italy. What grace, they argued, could be lacking to one that was crowned at the Capitol, and stood in the stead of Petrarch? Son of a cavalier and a noble lady, Perfetti began very early his office as a bard; his Latin biographer, with vast gravity, says the child made “what in our tongue is called rime” at eleven months; small wonder that he became famous when still a youth, and was welcomed at parties of every sort, weddings, social discussions, what not, where he exercised his gift of extemporaneous song. Of a summer night[[1150]] he would improvise songs in praise of some family, singing under their windows, an amiable fancy. Cianfogni heard him on these occasions, and says that the poems were often taken down in writing by persons concealed from the poet’s view; but he rarely wrote verses of his own, finding that sort of composition by no means to his taste. He refused to undertake an epic, though the pope urged him thus to rival Tasso and Ariosto. Ottava rima was his favourite verse, and he was fond of a musical accompaniment. His memory, too, was prodigious; in brief, Cianfogni hopes that this Moses will lead poetry back from its exile in a land of paper and print to its old glories of the living voice and the hearing of the ear. The Latin pamphlet, which has some interesting remarks on related matters in poetry, says that Perfetti learned his art at Sienna from one Bindius “poeta extemporalis,” who excelled in that sort of verse which Berni composed, and which was called from its founder Bernesque. Come to his full powers, Perfetti shunned no kind of poem, and excelled in every branch of the art. His songs were repeated on all sides and passed current among the people; while, for the rest, he could sing majora too, winning applause from the pope himself, and getting crowned at the Capitol in a function of unusual splendour. Physically, his poetic ardour was formidable and “almost passed belief,” eyes aflame, brow contracted, panting bosom, and a flow of words so vehement and swift that his harp-player was often left far in the rear; the song done, Perfetti could hardly stand for exhaustion, and slept but little on the ensuing night.[[1151]] So strenuous a life told on his health, one must think; at any rate, he died of paralysis in July, 1747.
This account of Perfetti is amusing, but much may be learned from it. Significant is the fact that he always sang his verses as he composed them, kept to one fixed rhythm, and had a harp to accompany him,—music once more in her original function as muse. Significant, too, is his aversion from pen and paper, his sensible refusal to try epic and poems of great length. That physical excitement and that reaction, too, are in line with the old communal elation, and are at no great remove from similar states of the body in medicine men, magicians, priests of the oracle, and even the rapt poet of a traditional prime. Significant, finally, is the feeling on the part of his friends that with him poetry was going back to first principles, and could thus bathe in the fountain of youth. But it was not to be. The communal fashion of poetry was already a lost cause. Soli cantare periti Arcades; the “poet in every man” is passive and not active; and the gift of improvisation comes now in vain, for the conditions which once gave it sole validity are vanished beyond recall. Shakspere’s kindred three, the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, once frankly accepted as public and privileged characters, sacred even, must now play the fool nowhere but in their own houses.
Whatever it gained by the process, poetry has been forced to give up its immediate power over men, and to console itself with what Herder called a “paper eternity.” This triumphant artist, who now holds its destinies in trust, stands at such a remove from its beginnings, his very art seems so opposed to rude songs of the prime, and the public making of verse[[1152]] has become so deject and wretched, that one must face again, and this time in conclusion of the whole matter, a question of identity. Is it all one and the same art? Has all this pother about refrain and rhythm concerned the beginnings of actual poetry, or only hints and forewarnings as alien to poetry itself as the brute beast is alien to civilized man? Three answers may be made to this question. With Aristotle, or rather with what one takes to be the meaning of Aristotle, one may sunder as into two distinct arts the improvisation of primitive throngs and the deliberate poetry of maker and seer. Here, of course, is a denial of identity. Again, with Scherer,[[1153]] one may ignore improvisation by throngs, recognize only the difference between oral and written record, and assume for earliest poetry conditions analogous to those of modern times,—the need for entertainment on the part of a “public,” and the answering performance of an “entertainer” who languishes or thrives according to the state of the literary market. Here is identity outright, but far too much of it. Whatever the merits of his Poetik, and it has great merits, Scherer was doomed to failure from the first, because, as Bücher[[1154]] rightly objected, no one can arrive at the spirit of primitive art by setting out from the categories of modern art. Moreover, Scherer flies in the face of facts, while the facts which go with that Aristotelian theory are surprisingly accurate. Not a syllable in Aristotle’s brief account of poetic origins has been assailed by all the evidence gathered for modern ethnology, and by all the historical and comparative work undertaken on the basis of this new material. Nevertheless, one hesitates before the Aristotelian theory of absolute difference, just as one hesitates before the notion of absolute identity. True, one must sunder the epoch of instinct, of throngs, and of improvisation, from the epoch of deliberate and solitary art; but this does not warrant one in granting to the second epoch alone the name and fact of poetry. There is a third answer to the question, reasonable in every way, which would neither transfer modern conditions to the remote past, nor yet blot out one of the two periods of poetry, but would see in all manifestations of the art, early and late, the presence and play of two forces, one overwhelmingly conspicuous at the beginning, the other overwhelmingly conspicuous now; forces which, in their different adjustments, have conditioned the progress of song and verse at every stage.