Apart from the general destruction of the margin of energy, one special thing that the new form of city life does to injure poetry is to keep uppermost in men's consciousness a feverish sense of the importance of the present moment. We might call this sense the journalistic spirit of the city. How many typical metropolitans one knows who are forever in a small flutter of excitement over whatever is just happening, like a cub reporter on the way to his first fire, or a neuræsthete—if one may coin a word—who perceives a spider on her collarette. This habit of mind soon grows stereotyped, and is, of course, immensely stimulated by the multitudinous editions of our innumerable newspapers. The city gets one to living so intensely in the present minute, and often in the very most sensational second of that minute, that one grows impatient of the "olds," and comes to regard a constantly renewed and increased dose of "news" as the only present help in a chronic time of trouble. This is a kind of mental drug-habit. And its origin is physical. It is a morbid condition induced by the over-paced life of cities.
Long before the rise of the modern city—indeed, more than a century ago—Goethe, who was considerably more than a century ahead of his age, wrote to Schiller from Frankfort of the journalistic spirit of cities and its relation to poetry:
It seems to me very remarkable how things stand with the people of a large city. They live in a constant delirium of getting and consuming, and the thing we call atmosphere can neither be brought to their attention nor communicated to them. All recreations, even the theater, must be mere distractions; and the great weakness of the reading public for newspapers and romances comes just from the fact that the former always, and the latter generally, brings distraction into the distraction. Indeed, I believe that I have noticed a sort of dislike of poetic productions—or at least in so far as they are poetic—which seems to me to follow quite naturally from these very causes. Poetry requires, yes, it absolutely commands, concentration. It isolates man against his own will. It forces itself upon him again and again; and is as uncomfortable a possession as a too constant mistress.
If this reporter's attitude of mind was so rampant in cultivated urban Germany a century ago as to induce "a sort of dislike of poetic productions," what sort of dislike of them must it not be inducing to-day? For the appreciation of poetry cannot live under the same roof with the journalistic spirit. The art needs long, quiet vistas backward and forward, such as are to be had daily on one of those "lone heaths" where Hazlitt used to love to stalk ideas, but such as are not to be met with in Times Square or the Subway.
The joyful side of the situation is that this need is being met. A few years ago the city dwellers of America began to return to nature. The movement spread until every one who could afford it, habitually fled from the city for as long a summer outing as possible. More and more people learned the delightful sport of turning an abandoned farm into a year-round country estate. The man who was tied to a city office formed the commuting habit, thus keeping his wife and children permanently away from the wear and tear of town. The suburban area was immensely increased by the rapid spread of motoring.
Thus, it was recently made possible for hundreds of thousands of Americans to live, at least a considerable part of the year, where they could hoard up an overplus of vitality. The result was that these well-vitalized persons, whenever they returned to the city, were better able to stand—and adjust themselves to—the severe urban pace, than were the fagged city people. It was largely by the impact of this new vitality that the city was roused to the importance of physical efficiency, so that it went in for parks, gymnasia, baths, health and welfare campaigns, athletic fields, playgrounds, Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, and the like.
There are signs everywhere that we Americans have, by wise living, begun to win back the exuberance which we lost at the rise of the modern city. One of the surest indications of this is the fact that the nation has suddenly begun to read poetry again, very much as the exhausted poetry-lover instinctively turns again to his Palgrave during the third week of vacation. In returning to neglected nature we are returning to the most neglected of the arts. The renaissance of poetry is here. And men like Masefield, Noyes, and Tagore begin to vie in popularity with the moderately popular novelists. Moreover this is only the beginning. Aviation has come and is reminding us of the ancient prophecy of H. G. Wells that the suburbs of a city like New York will now soon extend from Washington to Albany. Urban centers are being diffused fast; but social-mindedness is being diffused faster. Men are wishing more and more to share with each brother man the brimming cup of life. Aircraft and true democracy are on the way to bear all to the land of perpetual exuberance. And on their wings the poet will again mount to that height of authority and esteem from which, in the healthful, athletic days of old, Homer and Sophocles dominated the minds and spirits of their fellow-men. That is to say—he will mount if we let him. In the following chapter I shall endeavor to show why the American poet has as yet scarcely begun to share in the poetry-renaissance.