For it is clear that two forces[[1155]] have been always active not only in letters but in human life, and that these forces answer to the communal influence dominant in early poetry and the centrifugal, individual tendency in modern verse. One phase of this dualism in poetry has been discussed above;[[1156]] it is now in order to look at it not with separation and analysis in view, but rather with an eye to the higher synthesis. No one questions the antithesis between man solitary and man social; and few will question the relative dominance of this or that type for any given age of the world. There are times so stamped by the individual impulse that all kinds of covenant, system, institution, are attacked, and nowhere more fiercely than in affairs of religion and of state. Seventeenth-century England is a case of this kind; individuals rush off to the wilderness to think and dream, and then rush back again to found a new sect. On the large stage the state is Cromwell, and on the small stage Quakerism is George Fox. Again, and for the other view, seventeenth-century France[[1157]] is a place of order, tradition, and collective peace. True, names are also current along with creed and rule, Bossuet, Boileau, and the great Louis himself; but it is dogma and order, not disintegration, that they proclaim. Consent is supreme here, as dissent is supreme across the Channel. In any line of human effort, and at any given time, one of these forces is dominant. But after all, it is only of a relative dominance that one can speak, and these labels that the historian puts upon his entire epoch are good until another historian, with another phase of it in mind, takes up the brush. There is constant play of those opposing forces, and if the collective spirit brought order, tradition, cohesion, to the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, the individual spirit even then fostered, as never before, the idea of a great man as mainspring in social progress. So, too, if disintegration ruled in seventeenth-century England, there was no lack of the collective and communal force; witness the social organization and religious democracy of the Quakers themselves. It was a time of sects and schisms; it was also a time of commonwealths spiritual, political, and social.
With this constant play and change of the two forces in mind, one may return to poetry itself and attempt a summary of the whole case, noting the alternation of communal and individual impulses, and seeking, by a study of their manifestations, to bring the beginning of the art into line with its present condition. It has been shown how easily confusion besets a discussion of that savage culture which is now declared communal in every way, and now painted as individual to the extreme of brute selfishness. So, too, when one says that early poetry was overwhelmingly choral and communal, that modern poetry is overwhelmingly individual, one has full warrant of facts; but it is well to remember just what these facts are, and so avoid ill-considered criticism. Poetry was a social creation and essentially communal at the start; although some of the most careful investigations in the early history of man[[1158]] are now putting stress upon the fact that for perhaps thousands of years humanity was hovering on the far border of communal organization, and led a mainly selfish and unsocial life. Man of this period did not have to unite with his fellows for purposes of mutual help and for defence against a common foe; like many wild animals, he could have roved about in smallest groups, each member of which got its own food for itself, often, as in favoured climates, with a minimum of exertion. Hence, too, for long stretches of time, no need of organized labour, of any economic system. But these needs all came at last;[[1159]] and when primitive man confronted them, he began his social history, and communal life was a fact. Here, too, in these rude communal beginnings, consent and rhythm played their parts. Now it is no argument whatever against the assumption that earliest poetry was strongly communal to say that earliest social man himself was only feebly and tentatively communal; the point is that where he was communal it was to a degree rendered utterly impossible for the present, and almost incredible for the past, by reason of the very social progress in which that communism, that consent, formed the first step. So, too, when it is said that the individual element in primitive poetic art was at a minimum, there is nothing counter to this assertion in the fact that early man was close to the absolutely individual and centrifugal state; whenever the individual made himself felt in poetry, it was as an individual bound by the new social tie, and his individual expression was a part of the communal expression. But, as was just said, the new communal element, so far as it went, was communal to an almost exclusive degree; not until after long ages of alternating collective and individual forces, working within the social union, was the individual socially free to make himself master in a wholly social art. It is a fact full of significance that the nearer social groups, like the Veddahs and the Botocudos, stand to the brutish, unstable, isolated, and wandering life of earliest man, so much the closer and more emphatic is their tentative expression of social consent in the dance, which is almost a continuous ring of humanity, with just two prominent characteristics: the tightest possible clasp of individual to individual, and the most exact consent of rhythm in the limbs that are free to move. Yet when the dance is past, and the ring is broken, its individual members go back to a life marked by hardly any social traits. As to labour, Bücher[[1160]] puts stress on the priority of women in gregarious songs of toil; while men were stalking game, the women combined in movements and chorals of work,[[1161]] and a certain antithesis is not far to seek which would give women the primacy in early stages of poetry, while men lord it almost exclusively in these latter days. No woman, with the doubtful exception of Sappho, has crossed the bounds of what is known as minor poetry; no woman, though women sing and have most need of song from the cradle to the death-bed, has been a great composer; no woman, not even George Eliot or any of her clever cousins in New England, has yet laid hold of that quality which goes with triumphs of the individual poet, the quality of humour. Why women were so prominent in the communal poetry of the beginnings, is easily answered and is a question to be asked; why women fail as individuals to reach the higher peaks of Parnassus, is a question perhaps not to be asked, although the answer might well seem a distinct recognition of woman’s great services to the art. At certain stages of poetry women have been nursing mothers without whose love and zeal for song poetry would have fallen into evil ways indeed. In any case, woman looms larger than man in that shadowy world of beginnings; her life was more consistently social, and her quicker emotional nature, whatever it may seem to modern eyes, gave her an advantage over the more stolid and more solitary male.
How is one to bind these beginnings to the present condition of poetry? With that alternation of social, choral impulses and impulses of the individual, poetry is not simply swinging back and forth between two positions, but makes a steady advance. As in social progress, at each fresh occasion on which the individual isolates himself from society, he takes with him the accumulated force that society, by its main function, has stored up from traditions of the past, and as whenever he returns to society, he brings back as his own contribution a fresh strength derived from more or less unfettered thinking over vital problems, so it is with communal and artistic forces in poetry. For the mere case of poetry as a body of literature, on one hand, and the poet as an individual on the other hand, this relation is plain enough, and speaks for itself. Poetry does even more for the poet than the poet does for poetry. But when one passes from materials to conditions and elements, asking for what is social or communal in the modern poetry of art at its best, few answers, if any, are to be heard. Some answer, however, is demanded, and it must try to rise to the height of so great an argument. Where, then, is the trace of direct communal elements in great poetry?
The modern artist in poetry triumphs mainly by the music of his verse and by the imaginative power which is realized in his language, often merely by the suggestion in his language; for poetry, as Sainte-Beuve prettily remarked, lies not in telling the story but in making one dream it. For present purposes, then, it will be enough to look at the formal quality of rhythm and the more creative quality of imagination. Assuming that the second chapter of this book proved what it set out to prove, one must see in rhythm, or regularity of recurrence due to the consenting cadence of a throng, the main representative of communal forces; although repetition in its other forms goes back to the very condition of choral poetry itself. Because the critics take rhythm and verbal repetition largely for granted in the work of any great poet, and look rather to his excellent differences in thought and in variation of style, one must not ignore the immense significance of those communal forces in the poetry of art. It is not the mere rhythm, grateful, exquisite, and powerful as that may be, but it is what lies behind the rhythm, that gives it such a place in poetry; it appeals through the measures to the cadent feet, and so through the cadent feet to that consent of sympathy which is perhaps the noblest thing in all human life. The triumphs of modern prose are great, but they fail one and all to take the place of rhythmic utterance; they fail even to do at their best what poetry often does in its mediocrity. The short story commands pathos to an almost intolerable degree; Balzac’s heartless daughters bring old Père Goriot close to the plight of Lear, so far as this pathos is concerned; and when Ibsen wishes to touch the quick of things in a play, he does well, from his point of view, to discard jingling verses and to use the prose of common conversation, thus bringing one face to face with the pathos of bare and actual life,—very actual and very bare. Pathos, indeed, all these prose triumphs show, and pathological is the word for them. They belong to surgery. Poetry, recoiling from bare and actual life, has a very different function. Significant is the popular use of this word, poetry; when one says that the poetry has gone out of one’s life, one means that something very like Ibsen has come in, that one can no longer idealize life and can see in it only its flatness and bareness. The cadence of those feet has ceased, and with it the hint of consent and sympathy. For when the Veddahs leave their solitary and often desperate search for food, come together, cling each to each as close as may be in that arrow-dance of theirs, and sing for hours their monotonous chorus, it is certainly not done in order that they may see bare and actual life, but rather that they may escape it and forget it. It is not surgery they seek, but medicine, and this either tonic or opiate; indeed, the twofold function of poetry could be ranged under such a head. Tonic were the cheery chorals of actual labour, old as social man, songs of battle and the march, festal recapitulation of hunt and work and fight. They idealized life; they appealed to sympathy, and heartened the solitary by a sense of brotherhood. So, in these latter days, tonic are the passages which stir the heart of a young man who reads wisely his Goethe, and tonic too—why not?—all those jingling platitudes beloved and quoted of the youth who make valedictory speeches in the village school; tonic, in fine, whatever gedenke zu leben rings out from poets of the virile and the sane. And from the beginning to the end, this tonic poetry falls naturally into the rhythm of a march. On the other hand, poetry is an opiate; the solitary man ran to a choral throng not only that he might find brotherhood and sympathy, but also that he might forget himself,—a task which the wild chorus of Dionysos could accomplish no less surely and thoroughly than the very grapes and vintage of the god. Like these, poetry helped man to forget his troubles; like these, the whirl and motion of cadenced dancing brought about a kind of intoxication; and the graceful words with which Sir William Temple concludes his essay on poetry have gained a deeper and yet a more literal meaning through the researches of ethnology and the proof which now lies before us of the extent to which primitive man has found in dance and song a refuge from the bare hideousness of life. For this early art, for this soothing and flattering function of it, the main force lay in rhythm; and if one wishes to call rhythm the conventional part of poetry, one degrades it not a whit by the name. Early poetry was exactly that,—a conventional affair, an idealized view of life, now tonic and now opiate in its aim. But whether to hearten or to soothe, stimulant or sedative, poetry found its initial source of energy in rhythm; most intimate of all the arts, and nearest to the heart of man, poetry will part with this pulse of rhythm only when the sea shall part with its tides.
Rhythm, then, binds in a single bond both the beginning and the end. But its formula is one which any rimer can use with more or less skill, and modern verse makes far wider and deeper claims, claims which no one has thought to carry back to the beginnings of poetry. Where, in those early days, was that rare quality of imagination to which the critic now appeals when he sets off a masterpiece of poetry from its rivals? To answer this question, one cannot cite mere history; chorus and refrain and shards of rustic rime must be left aside; and one must even beg a little help from æsthetics itself: so muss denn doch die Hexe dran.
Described in its simplest form, the quality of modern poetic imagination seems to be a power, by suggestive use of musical and figurative human speech, to put the solitary reader into the mood which would arise naturally in him under the pressure of certain actual events or of a certain actual scene. To repeat the phrase of Sainte-Beuve, “la poésie ne consiste pas à tout dire, mais à tout faire rêver.” Even primitive poetry was an idealization, an abstraction, a narcotic, a kind of waking dream; modern poetry is also a dream, but with deeper and wider issues, and with a purpose far more clearly defined. Now the great passages of poetry, such as those which Matthew Arnold used as tests for excellence, easily fall into one of the two categories; they revive, even create, the mood felt either in the pressure of actual events or in the presence of an actual scene. That beautiful line which Arnold quotes from Dante is simply the imaginative and conventionalized sense of beatific worship such as all men have felt in varying degree; while for the thousand cases where nature is treated, there can be no doubt whatever of the tie which binds even the most imaginative and solitary poet to the old singing throng. Nature is nothing without man to interpret it; and neither man nor nature could stand in this mutual relation had not social consent and social processes created these abstract ideas, this very “man,” this very “nature,” by the reciprocal working of communal and individual forces. It was thus a social process which brought man to read his condition and fates in terms of nature, or else to read nature in terms of his own condition and fates. His own condition and fates were ideas that came to him through a kind of social reflection; and nature grew “poetic” only by reason of man’s social organization, which sprang from consciousness of kind, took shape in consent, and has begotten first the communal idea and then the idea of humanity. Only the eye “which hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality” can see the “poetic” side of nature; and even man’s mortality is a fact which came home to him in this poetic sense only when social organization had put the notion of humanity before his mind. So much is said of being “alone with nature” as a necessary condition for the enjoyment of its poetic side, and for sympathy with it, that one forgets what sympathy means. The social foundation is now forgotten; without it, however, there would be no poet’s solitary rapture at all. Sympathy of the poet at its highest is only rising to a new pitch in the sense of kind; and although the prayer of St. Francis[[1162]] has been quoted nigh unto death, one may be allowed to revive it, not merely because of its wide sympathy, embracing “my brother, the sun,” and all created things, but also because this sympathy is the poetic expression of an idea which St. Francis put into actual working on earth, in that community of brothers in the bonds of divine and human love.
Nature, however, and the fates of man are not always so stupendous or so abstract in their relations. There is a close, familiar tie, now cheery in its kind, and now sad, in the coming and going of the seasons. How much of modern poetry is bound up with this simple and obvious motive; and how easily one finds here the connection between new song and old! In a preceding chapter it was the difference we sought; here it is the identity, not merely of rhythm, but of imaginative force. Much has been said of that lyric appeal to the season and to the scene with which rude songs of the dance, and, later, actual ballads, were wont to begin: Sumer ys ycumen in, and Lenten is comen with Love to toune, are fossil bits of English verse in this kind. So, too, as the coming season was welcomed, the parting season had its lyric regret. What more is done by the most imaginative poem of our day, than to revive in the solitary reader that immediate delight or sorrow of the singing and dancing throng? When one says that the poet ennobles this actual scene, and adds something which was not present in sunshine and woods and waters and green earth, not even in the song of the birds, what else does one mean but that the poet has brought these things under the spell of human emotion, precisely as the human emotion of the dancers mingled with the scene of their festivity? Nothing is more common in folksong than lament for wintry desolation, for the silence and absence of the birds. Walther von der Vogelweide touches the old motive and the old cadence with slight but graceful art; and it is “I” instead of “we,” although the communal emotion is not far away. Then comes the full power of imagination in a certain sonnet, and in a certain line of it:—
Bare, ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
Take away the “ruin’d choirs,” and of course one takes away Shakspere; but there is another alternative. Take away the older festal throngs of summer, the sorrowing throngs at its close; take away that cadence of consenting feet which echoes in the verse; take away the human sympathy which was so fostered by this consent,—and those “ruin’d choirs” are left as purposeless and idle as the void of space.
So, too, with other forms of imagination in poetry. Nature apart, and on themes as abstract as one will, great artistic poetry is still powerless to sever its connection with this communal imagination of sympathy and consent. Some of the strong passages in later poetry derive their energy from despair. “Man’s one crime,” says the Spaniard, “is to have been born;” while between Fitzgerald and the tentmaker lies the credit for that verse which bids God take as well as give pardon for the wickedness of mankind. This is called sublime. When the savage beats and breaks his gods, or reviles them in reiterated verse, he is called silly; but perhaps his disillusions, put into choral statement, may bring him something of that grim comfort which civilized man finds in a rhythmic defiance not absolutely different in kind. Nor, again, was the passing of a god, or of a system of gods, the same thing for communal chorus with those mounting races in the prime, as with these belated and stunted hordes. Defiance, however, apart, on the positive religious side choral praise is still a fact; and choral comment on the ways of God with man, that enthusiasm for which imagination is only a substitute, that sursum corda of congregational singing, that lapse of the individual and that triumph of the community, are enough to check one’s impulse to think of early communal singing in terms of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. It is hard, indeed, to pass back from conditions of solitary and artistic imagination to conditions of communal imagination; but the process is not impossible. If one will simply open a Shakspere and read aloud the passage where Ophelia tells her father how Hamlet came to her closet and bade her that silent farewell; the praise of friendship chanted so finely by Hamlet to Horatio; the parting at dawn of Romeo and Juliet; the declaration of Portia;[[1163]] the last speech of Othello; Macbeth arming for the final fight; Prospero at the end of the mask: familiar as these all are, the mere series of impressions will give one a new sense of the varied creative power to be found in a single field of poetry. Then, with all this ringing in one’s ears, let one read aloud the shorter version of Sir Patrick Spens, and compare its imaginative range with the imaginative range of Shakspere. Neither simplicity alone, nor the change from drama to ballad, will cover this difference.[[1164]] The strongest differencing element is the antithesis of individual artistic imagination in widest range, and of sympathy concentrated upon a small, but compact group. It is a step from the great world to a little canton, from humanity to a clan; spaces have shrunk, and sympathy almost lies in that actual touch of hand and hand, which once did for primitive poetry what imagination now does for the poet. At the heart of them both, however, drama and ballad, is this sympathy and consent of kind. True, the ballad is late and has its share of art; but the line drawn to it from the drama is a curve to be projected into prehistoric conditions, and able to connect the crude sympathy of kind expressed in choral repetition with noblest imaginative achievements of the perfected art.