The Beginnings of Poetry

by Francis Barton Gummere

There is another process in the poetry of art which serves to disguise the real tendency toward individual instead of communal emotion. Communal poetry had a wide, free, outdoor life; the modern poet is bounded in a nutshell,—but he has his dreams. With intense subjectivity comes the need to cover a vast range of space and time; in place of the clan or the community, its grief and joy, set forth by the communal song, one finds a solitary poet, a sort of sick king in Bokhara, dealing with the universe, and putting into his lines that quality which is best expressed in general by the often abused name of weltschmerz, and in particular by those countless passages in modern lyric like the poem which Shelley wrote “in dejection,” or that verse of Keats which expresses so admirably the modern lyric attitude in contrast with a singing and dancing throng:—

On the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone and think.

For this lyric daring, this voyaging through strange seas of thought alone, this blending of personal reflection with the whole range of human thought and human emotion, makes poetry cosmic, but does not make it communal or even objective. The sudden interest in savages, and the glorification of primitive virtues, even the reasoning against reason and the emotion for emotion, are part of the subjective process. Jean-Jacques, Ossian, the bésoin de réverie, cosmopolitan sentiment and sensibility set in vogue by Sterne,[^[329]]—all these details of the romantic movement need no emphasis; but it is significant that this subjective search for the objective brought genuine communal poetry into view, and it is by no means to the glory of the critic that he so often puts romantic zeal and poetry of the people upon the same plane of origins. The scientific triumphs of a century and more have added external nature to the poet’s province; they have put a new sympathy for natural things along with zeal for humanity and that sense of the individual and the artist which were due to the renaissance, justifying to the full Bacon’s definition of art as homo additus naturae. Poetry now means the emotional mood of a thinker alone with his world; we forget that it ever meant anything else.

The subjective and the sentimental in such excess must each beget a reaction; they roll back upon themselves, and the shock has two results, which the critic is tempted at first sight to call objective. One is the sharp dramatic study, where the poet puts himself into the place of another person. The second is that great reaction of sentiment which is called humour. As for the dramatic element, there is no question that a would-be communal reaction, “the need of a world of men,” follows naturally upon excess of the subjective note. But the communal reaction cannot restore communal conditions. The we of throng poetry has yielded little by little to the lyrical I-and-Thou, and finally to the I, pure and simple. An obvious reaction is to put the I into the personality of another. This device, now so common, began in the early renaissance by the identification of the poet, not with another person, but with another class of persons. Burckhardt notes the Canzone Zingaresca of Lorenzo as “one of the earliest products of the purely modern impulse to put one’s self, in a poetic and conscious manner, into the situation of a given class of people.”[^[330]] The “objectivity” of later poets runs into this mould; it is a conscious process, however well done, and is quite different from the lack of all subjective interest which marks early song. One is reminded of the splendid efforts of Horace to bring back the courage and simplicity and austerity of old Roman life to the Rome of Augustus. Nietzsche may bid us build our cities on Vesuvius, and Stevenson may revive that old love for “the bright eyes of danger”; but it is not the old lover that the Scot revives, and the silva antiqua is of modern planting. The transfer of persons brings one no nearer to communal objectivity; it is a reaction against individual sentiment, which only throws into stronger relief the prevailing tone of a poetry overwhelmingly lyric, individual, and sentimental.

Again, growing out of the same change of heart from the communal to the personal and artistic, is that essentially modern quality of humour, which really springs from an intensely subjective, not to say introspective, state; it is sentiment in disguise. One of the surest tests of communal poetry is the lack of conscious sentiment and of conscious humour. When we say that a ballad is pathetic, either the pathos and sentiment are in solution with the material of the ballad, or else we read them into the ballad outright.[^[331]] So, or nearly so, with the humour. Communal humour is cruel; as religion, now a matter of love, began with abject fear, laughter, so unkind scientific folk assert, began as exultation over the torture of a conquered foe, just as children are often amused at the suffering of man and beast, until they take the cue of pity from their elders. Fielding, in his reaction against overdone sentiment, also went back to the communal idea of humour. Parson Adams is cudgelled and abused within an inch of his life, and in Tom Jones bloody heads and broken bones make for merriment on all occasions. The squire of the picaresque novel,—Lazarillo de Tormes for an early case, or for a late and trivial example of tremendous adventures of this sort, Trufaldin in Pigault-Lebrun’s Folie Espagnole—like the poor hero of Cervantes, even like Mr. Pickwick, like all the breed, may look to bear unmerciful beatings by way of contributing to the fun. In the later ballads of Robin Hood, tinkers and beggars trounce the hero again and again; and it is a concession to the yokel’s point of view when the subtle humour of Falstaff in Henry IV yields to those indignities of pinchings and the buck-basket at which modern readers boggle in the Merry Wives. Burckhardt again lays under obligation the historian of literature in general, and the champion of this antithesis in particular, when he points out[^[332]] the clannish and communal note of what in the Middle Ages passed for humour. It was a thing not of individuals but of classes, guilds, cities, towns, villages,[^[333]] countries,—collective altogether. Jests at Scotchmen or at our own Jerseymen, and the exchange of civilities between rival colleges, are jaded survivals of this honest but obvious merriment. Scholars, chiefly Teutonic by birth,[^[334]] have a way of praising this sort of thing as sound, old, wholesome fun, derber humor; but it is an acquired scholastic taste, and, as a rule, one does not lay down his Uncle Toby to listen to mediæval banter. If modern humour is an antidote against modern sentiment, both come from the same source, and similia similibus was never more true than here; sentiment is individualized emotion in excess, and humour is the recoil. Walpole had this in mind when he said that life is a tragedy to one who feels, but a comedy to one who thinks. The humour which springs from excessive thought, from sentiment in reaction, is at the world’s end from that rough and boisterous communal fun; it is equally removed from delight in tragedy, itself a sign of youth.[^[335]] To trace the course of modern poetic humour from Chaucer, Villon, Dunbar, down to Heine, who does in verse what Sterne did in prose, would be “a journey like the path to heaven,” in whichever sense one chooses to take the comparison,—delightful or difficult; enough in this place to point out the flickering humour that plays across the subjectivity and sentiment of Heine’s Death Bed,[^[336]] with its parody of Homer, its scorn for the public, and all the rest.

Such are the chief differencing factors of the poetry of art as they appear in process of evolution from the Middle Ages to the present time. They belong to poetic material; a further result of the process appears in poetic style. Individual and sentimental poetry has developed a poetic dialect and widened the gap between the speech of a poet and the speech of common life. This goes deeper than conventional phrases and epic repetitions, which at first sight induce one to assert precisely the opposite view and call modern poetry a return from the conventional to the simple in expression. Emotion, however, that is spontaneous, communal, direct, and without taint of reflection, will catch the nearest way and avoid deliberate or conscious figures of speech, the trope or “turning” peculiar to our verse; and there is a steady progress in poetry from the simple or natural[^[337]]—which does not exclude the metaphorical, if only metaphor be the outcome of unconscious processes of speech—to the tropical; poetry little by little makes its own dialect.[^[338]] Of course there are excesses and subsequent returns to simplicity, witness the metaphysical school of poets in England; but the tendency is always to the individual, which is the unusual and unexpected, and hence to the metaphorical. Precisely, too, as sentiment turned upon itself, so the metaphorical turns upon itself and makes a metaphor out of the literal; for example, Professor Woodberry in his sonnet on a portrait of Columbus:—

Is this the face, and these the finding eyes?

But this simplicity and objective force of poetic language, rarely so successful as here, and rare in any case, is itself subjective and the outcome of individual assertion.

It is now in order to look at survivals of communal and primitive verse, and to learn from a study of their differencing factors no longer what the beginnings of poetry were not, but what they really were.