[2] Ibid. (Ibid.).
[3] 'Les Heures où l'on crée' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
[4] 'L'En-Avant' (Les Forces Tumultueuses).
[5] 'Le Verbe' (La Multiple Splendeur).
[6] Ibid. (Ibid.).
THE NEW PATHOS
Lassé des mots, lassé des livres.
. . . . . . . . .
Je cherche, en ma fierté,
L'acte qui sauve et qui délivre.
É.V., 'L'Action.'
The primitive poem, that which came into being long before writing or print, was nothing but a modulated cry that was hardly language, a cry won from joy or pain, mourning or despair, recollection or passionate entreaty, but always from fulness of feeling. It was pathetic, because it was produced by passion; pathetic, because its intention was to produce passion. The poem of those great and distant men who were the first to find word and speech in the darted cry of feeling, was an invocation of the crowd; an exhortation; a fiery incitement; an ecstasy; a direct electric discharge of feeling to feeling. The poet spoke to the others, an individual to a circle. The auditors stood before him in expectation—somewhat as Max Klinger in his new picture has gathered them together in front of blind Homer—they waited, watched, listened, surrendered themselves, let themselves be carried away; or they resisted. That poem and the delivery of it were not something finished and presented for approval; no vessel or ornament already hammered into shape and perfectly chiselled; they were something in the process of creation, something newly growing at that moment, a struggle with the hearer, a wrestling with him for his passion.
Poets lost this close, glowing contact with the masses when writing was invented. What the dissemination of the written word, and still more, in after days, the infinite multiplication of printing, dowered them with; all the new influence over spaces hitherto closed; the fact that their words were henceforth alive in countries which they had never visited; that men drew strength and inspiration and vital courage from their words long after their own bodies had fallen into dust—this vast and mighty effect had only been obtained by relinquishing that other and perhaps not lesser effect—dialogue, that standing face to face with the multitude. By slow degrees poets became something imaginary to the public. When they spoke, they really only listened to themselves; more and more their poem became a lonely colloquy with themselves; the harangue became a monologue, more and more lyrical in a new sense and less and less moving. More and more their poem travelled away from speech; more and more it lost that mysterious, passionate fire that is only fed by the moment, by standing face to face with an excited crowd, by the magical influx of tension and stimulation out of the heart of the hearer into the poet's own words. For, with his expectation, with his eager eyes, his excitement, and his intractable impatience, every listener does something for the speaker: he goads him; he forces something of his expectant restlessness into the response that has not yet been made. But the moment the poet no longer spoke to the crowd, no longer to a circle, but fashioned his words for print and writing, a new and peculiar sensation was developed in him. He accustomed himself to speaking only for himself; to conceiving his own feeling as important, irrespective of effect and force; to holding a conversation with none but himself and silence. And his poem changed more and more. Now that the poet no longer had the panting roar of the response, the cry of passion, the exultation of enthusiasm, as the finale of his poetry—the last accord, as it were, belonging to his own music—he sought to complete the harmony in the verse by means of itself. He rounded his poem with an artist's care, as though it were an earthenware vessel; illumined it with colours like a picture; rilled it with music; more and more he relinquished the idea of persuading, of convincing,.of inspiring. He was content that the poem should have no feeling for other men, and gave it only the life and the mood of his own world. In that period of transition, we may suppose, 'poetic' diction first came into being, that language by the side of the living language which petrified more and more as time went on into a dialect hostile to the world, into bloodless marble. Of old, the poetic language was not one that existed side by side with the real language; it was only the last intensification of the real language. By the rhythm of higher passion, by the fire of harangue, it became a sacred fire, a blest intoxication, a festivity in the work-a-day world. Thus, as intensified vitality, language could be different without ever being unintelligible, could remain with and yet above the people, while the lyric poetry of to-day has become, for the most part, strange and worthless to active men who live in the midst of realities, to the artisan and the toiler.