When it cometh in my thought
Of this earthly joy, how it all goeth to naught.[[316]]
Not so with Villon. He knows no guild, save that of the jolly beggars; and he can do with ease what even Ronsard does only with difficulty, and leaning on a classical staff:—
Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n’ira pas,—
paraphrase of Horace. But these ladies pass in line before Villon for his own whim;[[317]] they are there to throw a more intense light upon his own personality; and the cry of the refrain, subtle but absolute touch of individual sentiment, is the new lyric cry.[[318]] Across the channel this cry is echoed in what at first hearing sounds like the veriest poem of a guild, Dunbar’s Lament for the Poets,[[319]] and in its refrain, superficially so mediæval, Timor mortis conturbat me! But for English lyric, Dunbar is the first poet of sentiment, in its modern meaning, as Villon is for the French. In brief, the more one studies these changes, which could be detailed to the limits of a book, the clearer one sees that Europe learned from Villon, Dunbar, and their fellows, to take sentiment[[320]] instead of the old morality, and to regard lyric verse as the bidding to a private view of the poet’s mind. The poet now makes himself the central point of all that he says and sees; he lays all history, all romance, under tribute to support the burden of his own fate and frame his proper picture; he is the sun of the system; he serves no clan or guild, and admits his readers only one by one to an audience. The advance from Villon’s time is chiefly to add the intellectual to the individual, an obvious process. Emotion has come so thoroughly under individual control that the art is now conscious and the artist supreme, and so thoroughly under intellectual control that the feelings, however common and widely human their appeal, must own the mastery of thought. The one involves the other; for consent of emotions is a far easier affair than consent of opinions and agreement of reasoning. Emotion is the solvent of early superstition, traditional beliefs and affections, in a community, as it is in an individual. “I felt,” says Rousseau, “before I thought; it is the common lot of humanity.”[[321]] In societies custom is a consent of instincts, an unconscious law; legislation, definite and conscious, is a consent of thinking individuals. A creed has always been easy to change, for it is matter of thought; a cult, a form, a superstition, communal instincts, in a word, go not out even with prayer and fasting.
Objections against all this have little weight. One is told that the renaissance brought uniformity and not diversity of poetic form and thought. But that rationalism, so called, which then came in, and which made reason superior to emotion, worked for the individual and not, as critics say, for the social forces in art.[[322]] It is true that all this rational activity, this intelligent study and discussion of the classics, led to a certain uniformity in poetic work; but every advance in rationalism really accents the individuality, the artistry, the intellectual power of the poet, and leads him further from the communal and instinctive emotional level. Keen emotion brings men closer; keen thinking separates their paths, even if it leads them to one destination. Communal emotion is still the mine whence a poet gets his gold; but where the gold was once current in mere bulk, or at best in weight, it must now be stamped with the sharpest possible impression of artistic thought. Or, again, one may be more precise in one’s objection. Attacking this idea that emotion, or the mass, rules in one age, and the individual, or thought, in another, as something akin to Comte’s discredited evolutionary drama in three great acts,—feeling, fancy, reason,—one may insist on the piercing emotional individualism and subtle thinking of the church at a time when the communal note is assumed as dominant in mediæval life. Here again we must protest against the tyranny of terms. What does Haym mean by the individualism of the Middle Ages, and precisely what was this individualism of the church? According as one looks at the church, one may say that it was individual or that it was communal in its influence. There are really three elements in the case. The people of the Middle Ages in Europe were to a great extent organized in a communal system, for the unlettered community kept many features of the clan, not to say of the horde, and social growth itself was a matter of the guild. In such relations the individual had little to say; and it was out of these conditions that the renaissance, working first through the Italian commonwealths, began to draw the individual into his new career. Here, then, was the communal life of the Middle Ages. The second element in the case is the church as a huge guild, organized for the communal life out of which it grew, and subordinating individual thought, emotion, will, to the thought, emotion, and will of this whole body. These two elements, long in undisputed power, slowly yielded to a third. Within the church itself, and at first unable to exist outside of it, lay this intellectualized and individualized emotion which in later times found the church to be its implacable foe; whether the Hebrew psalms be congregational or personal,[[323]] it is certain that the monk in his cell felt them to be intensely individual, and in the hymns which he wrote, largely by inspiration of these psalms, one finds much of that spirit which fills a modern lyric. A hymn has two meanings for the Christian. One is its communal meaning, as the Scottish kirk could prove; and probably no one but a Scot, with “the graves of the martyrs” in mind, can fully appreciate this meaning of a congregational hymn. But to most people a hymn has the individual note of Jesus, Lover of my Soul; this is the note of early Christian hymns, and is due to a protest against communal conditions[[324]] made by that spirit of Christianity which has been its chief force in modern times, that certification of value given to the humblest single life, that lifting of the chattel serf into a soul; a spirit which began and fought the long battle against tradition of race and clan and guild. De Vigny, in his exquisite Journal of a Poet,[[325]] points out the importance of the confessional in literary growth, and derives from this source the “romance of analysis,” with its exaggeration of the value of a single soul. This new accent upon the individual, due to the spirit of a new faith, was strengthened in the Middle Ages by what one understood of the spirit of classic poets; and when the two forces had worked into the heart of mediæval life, mediæval life ceased to be; modern life stood in its place, modern art, letters, statecraft even, all inspired by the individual principle.[[326]] Now the mistake made by men who talk of the individualism of the Middle Ages is that they confuse this germ of intense personal emotion, mainly confined to the cell of the mediæval monk, with the conditions of mediæval life at large, conditions, by the way, which had little record in documents. One forgets that the records, mainly made by studious monks, would give an exaggerated importance to this personal element, this inner life, and would ignore to a great extent the life without. Müllenhoff did well to insist that the Middle Ages neither spoke the speech nor wore the garb of a monkish chronicle,—still less, it may be added, of a monkish hymn. With Christianity emphasizing the value of a single soul, with the emancipation of the individual from state, guild, church, and with the secularization of letters and art, this habit of referring wide issues of life to the narrow fortunes of an individual made itself master of poetry. The emotion of a clan yielded to the emotion of a single soul. A progress of this sort is seen in Sir Patrick Spens, Macbeth, and Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. Chronology in its higher form makes the ballad a mediæval and communal affair, the play a thing of art. Each deals with a Scot as centre of tragedy. In the ballad not a syllable diverts one from a group made up of the sailor, his comrades, and their kin. The men put to sea and are drowned; the ladies who will sit vainly waiting, the wives who will stand “lang, lang, wi’ their gold kaims in their hair,” give one in belated, unconscious, and imperfect form a survival of the old clan sorrow, a coronach in gloss. The men are dead, the women wail, and that is all. But Macbeth, as the crisis draws near, bewails along with his own case the general lot of man;[[327]] “der Menschheit ganzer Jammer fasst ihn an.” Finally, in Dover Beach, modern subjectivity wails and cries out on fate from no stress of misfortune, but quite à propos de bottes and on general principles. Subtract now the changes due to epic, dramatic, lyric form; the progress and the curve are there. The constancy of human nature, yes; but there are two worlds in which this constant human nature finds varying expressions: one is the mediæval, where St. Francis can say “laudato sia Dio mio signore con tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo frate sole” ... and so on, with his joy in nature; and one is the modern, where Wordsworth must strike that other note, my heart leaps up, or whatever else. Here, indeed, are two distinct worlds, even if it is the same human heart.
So, too, what one calls objective in modern poetry is not objective in the communal, mediæval sense; and what one thinks to be sentimental or even subjective in the ballads or other communal song is not subjective or sentimental in any modern way. A throng in those homogeneous conditions was unsentimental in its poetical expression for the good reason that a throng has emotions distinct from the emotions of an individual; this, too, is why sentiment and individualism have kept step in the progress of poetry. Tennyson is objective enough in his verses about the widow of a slain warrior and her rescuing tears when her child is brought to her. But this is not really objective, not communal; it is sentiment, of a high order to be sure, but sentiment. What a different point of view in the commonplace of the ballads! Was the head of the house slain and the widow left lamenting, invariably,—
Up spake the son on the nourice’s knee,
“Gin I live to be a man, revenged I’ll be;”
that is true communal and objective emotion. Scott, who was saturated with ballads and ballad lore, was the last of English poets who could write in an impersonal and communal way. After him always, as mostly before him, the subjective and sentimental note came canting in even where severest objectivity is supposed to reign. If one wishes to feel this in Scott,—for it is a thing to feel and not to prove by syllogisms,—one has only to read the final stanza of Bonnie Dundee; not great verse, indeed, but full of a certain unforced simplicity, a large air, a communal vigour, an echo of unpremeditated, impersonal, roundly objective song.[[328]]